The Story of the World: History for
the Classical Child
Volume 1: Ancient Times (From the Earliest Nomads to the Last Roman Emperor) by Susan Wise Bauer
At first glance, Susan Wise Bauer's The Story of the World seems like every homeschooling parent's dream — a well-written, engaging version of thousands of years of history condensed into one easily-read volume. And, in fact, that is what it is. As with all books, though, there are just as many cons as there are pros.
Susan Wise Bauer is a well-known name in homeschooling circles. A graduate of homeschooling, she is now a college professor and home educator to her own children. She is the author or co-author of several well-regarded books including The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. A study of world in history, done in order, is a very important part of that classical education, and she found existing curricula to be lacking because so often children are taught history all out of order, and many times in a "me-centric" method, with the social sciences first (neighborhoods, city, state, country) and world civilizations and history last. To combat this, Ms. Bauer has compiled her volumes of The Story of the World.
Volume 1 begins with a simple explanation of the concept of history, and how archaeology digs out the facts of history. Then she delves into how nomads of the Fertile Crescent lived, and what we know about them. From there, she goes from culture to culture, trying her best to place major events of ancient history into chronological order. Egypt, Babylon, the Jews, the Assyrians, India, China, Africa, Greece, Rome and more are covered in 40 chapters. Some cultures are covered more thoroughly than others, of course, because we have more historical facts available. Africa, however, is only touched on in one chapter, and the majority of that chapter is two Anansi stories, not actual history of the people or their culture. Similarly, the Americas only get one chapter, again because there is so little historical record left of those peoples.
Ms. Bauer did her very best to make this book very engaging and exciting for children to read on their own, or for a parent to read aloud to their children. The book is written in clear — but not dumbed-down — language, and she adds in the occasional bit of fictional story to show how a person from a particular time period might have lived. The only complaint about these stories is that she does not make it clear (to child readers, at least) that she is just telling a story in these cases. I had no trouble distinguishing between the factual writings and the stories, but I can easily see where children would have trouble. The only other complaint I have about Ms. Bauer's writing style is that she is overly fond of exclamation points. I'm sure she just wanted to make it exciting! And I guess it works! But we all know how annoying that can be!
Not being a well-read student of history myself, I cannot point out on my own any factual errors from general history, but I have read other reviews that pointed out certain small problems here and there. However, as this is a very condensed version of several thousand years of history, you'd be pretty foolish to use this book for anything other than a jumping-off point to begin further studies in history, and then you can find out for sure what is right and what is wrong.
One place that I do know for sure that mistakes are made are in her interpretations and extrapolations of Biblical historical events. Ms. Bauer chooses to begin her introduction to the Jewish nation with the story of Abraham — with a wildly un-Biblical version of the story of Abraham and his father, Terah. She builds this whole story around the two of them about their family business, what religion they followed, and Terah's worries about losing his business to the possibly incoming Babylonians. In her version, Abraham is polytheistic until Jehovah speaks to him. The story of Moses and the Exodus is much better, although she completely leaves out Moses killing an Egyptian, leaving for 40 years, then returning after being commissioned by God to lead the people out of Egypt. Similarly, the story of Jesus is mostly correct, being marred only by her version that it was the Romans who wanted to get rid of him because they were nervous about him being made king of the Jews and leading the Jews in rebellion against Rome.
Overall, I do recommend The Story of the World, with certain caveats. Use the book only as a starting point to more concentrated studies of individual topics, double-checking facts as you go. But for an overall, general sense of the order of the beginnings of our human history, I find it to be an excellent resource.
