History help! (yes, again)

[EMS83]

Yep, I'm still running around this hamster wheel. I work on other stuff for a couple of weeks, come back to this, freak out, and run away again. I need to just sort it out. I'm trying to take TWTM's lists and use it as a guide, but either I'm having no luck with the online catalog or the library is wimpy. Do I just skip over any biographical information about:

Nebuchadnezzar,

Hammurabi,

Homer,

Sennacherib,

Lao-Tzu,

Plato,

Aristotle,

Cicero,

Nero, and

Constantine?

For Confucius, Buddha, Pythagoras, and Socrates, there is literally one children's book per library listed in the online catalog (4 in the county, and they aren't on the ILL system with the rest of the state).

 

How about the books by Jeanne Bendick (Archimedes, Galen, & Herodotus)? Maybe more for 5th grade instead of 1st? It's hard to tell.

 

For literature, I can't pull up any tales or literature from India, China, Japan, Africa, Egypt, or Sumeria. No children's rewrites of the Greek or Chinese philosophers, no Chinese poetry, one Japanese folktale (The Crane Wife).

 

I'd like to have 1 (2 max) books on each topic. I was hoping to do it totally through the library, but it is disappointing me. Sooo, if I had to order just one or two books per topic, what would you recommend?

Edited March 26, 2012 by CES2005

[Chris in VA]

You may not find whole books about these ancient folks, esp at the kiddy level, because sometimes not much is really known about them, just what they espoused or what they did,not a lot of the kind of info you'd find in a modern biography. I think your best bet will be history encyclopedias, SOTW, and other books like those.

 

I'm sure you will be able to find a ton of kids' books on myths of "other lands." Have you looked under fairy and folk tales? I have a feeling it's all in the search words you are using in that case. Usually you won't find a lot that is a whole book about one mythological story, but rather an anthology.

[EMS83]

I'm looking for books like this. They don't need to be modern biographies, or even complete life stories. Just who they were and what they did in 20-50 pretty pages is actually exactly what I'd like to see and exactly what our library doesn't seem to have. Just something a bit more than the picture encyclopedias give me. I can pull up a list of children's books about Plato on Amazon and in the top 10 are 4 nice selections that look like they deserve a closer look. A search of our library catalog pulls up nothing similar on those topic for which I have gaps. They do have some children's "biographies," but not on all people or subjects.

 

As for legends and myths, that's a good point. I'm just more surprised than anything that I could pull up more on each individual subject. But I will look into anthologies.

 

What I'm really wrestling with is whether it's worth the investment right now or if it's ok to skip extra reading about Plato, or Aristotle, or whomever. We won't come back to it for 4 years and I think DD's "the world is shiny and new" syndrome will have somewhat worn off by then. Money is tight, though, and choosing to buy would lead to a very time-consuming hunt for the very best deal ever. Either way, I'd still like to hear if anyone has any favorites on the aforementioned topics that would be worth looking at if I chose to buy one or two for our bookshelves.

[SailorMom]

Our library is stinky as well.

I had to go to books that looked like they may have some reference to a person, invention, event, etc., and search through the indexes.

If I had only gone by the library's catalog - I would have had nothing.

Using the index of more general books, though, I was able to find what we needed (usually).