Who Really Discovered America?: Unraveling the Mystery & Solving the Puzzle

Great to have kids think about what might really have happened, and to remove the 'columbus myth." Never saw another book like it either.

Your assumption might be that a book entitled "Who Really Discovered America?" would be one that makes the case for the discovering of the Americas by the Vikings rather than Christopher Columbus, but those are only a pair of the possibilities here. The complete title of Avery Hart's Kaleidoscope Kids Book is "Who Really Discovered America? Unraveling the Mystery & Solving the Puzzle" and if there is one thing you need to know before diving into this book it would be that you are not going to get the answer as the end. That is because the point here is to present young readers, ages 7-14, with all of the opinions and theories that make up the evidence for this particular historical puzzle. The goal is not to answer the question as to who really discovered America but rather to instruct readers on the mysterious ways in which history reveals itself to inquiring minds. Recognizing that truth tacking is not easy, Hart provides his young readers with a five-point "Star Guide" to allow them to weigh the merits of the ideas they come across in this book. The idea is that each point on the star (or each finger on your hand) represents a particular point for which you can award 0 to 5 points for each theory: (1) Start with what you know: how does the new theory support the facts as you know them? (2) Throw out old opinions: Is your mind really open or do you secretly want a particular idea to be true (or untrue)? (3) Review the theory evidence: what specific evidence supports the theory and how reliable is it? (4) Use intuition: what does you gut say about the theory? (5) Put it all together: overall, does the idea make sense and fit with the other puzzle pieces? If you believe a theory is absolutely true it would score 25 points. Throughout the book the "Truth Trackers" are presented with not two but ten different theories to evaluate and see which one comes closest to the truth and earns the highest score: (1) The Land-Bridge Theory that humans first crossed a strip of land from Russia to Alaska; (2) The Multiple-Migration Theory that the first people to discover the Western Hemisphere came by boats, in small groups, over thousands of years; (3) The Woden-Lithi Theory that an ancient Scandinavian king traveled from Norway, across the Atlantic, and up the St. Lawrence River to Toronto in about 1750 B.C.; (4) The Lakota Theory that all human life began in the Black Hills of the Dakotas; (5) The Alien Theory that gifted aliens came to earth to marry the first apelike prehumans and create the intelligent human beings of today; (6) Van Sertima's African Theory that Africans arrived in America almost 2,000 years before Columbus; (7) Professor Xu's Asian Theory that refugees from the Chinese Shang dynasty influenced the development of the Olmec civilization; (8) The Other Way-Around Theory that ancient people from the Americas took to the oceans and sailed on currents to Africa, Asia, or Europe; (9) The Vikings "Discovered" America; and (10) Colum