Augustus Caesars World: A Story of Ideas and Events from Bc 44 to 14 Ad

I bought this book for my children's (12 and 13 year olds) history lessons and they are finding it very interesting as am I.

A bit dry. It does present history as a story of the person, which is better than some, but the child needs to be ready for all the terminology.

One of the great bonuses of parenting is that you get to introduce books to your own kids that wowed you when you were a kid yourself. Sometimes your children love the books as much as you did; sometimes they don't. But in either case, you get to revisit with old friends and see how much you and they have changed and retained over the years. Some of my best book friends when I was a kid were the wonderful illustrated histories of Genevieve Foster, and the one I loved most was *Augustus Caesar's World.* I recently introduced it (and a few others: *Washington's World*, *Lincoln's World*, *John Smith's World*, *Columbus's World*) to my 8 year old, and he's discovering the magic in them I did so many years ago. There are three qualities to *Augustus Caesar's World* that make it so entertaining and educating. The first is that it's incredibly well written. Foster has the gift of breathing life into historical accounts. In reading about Cicero's execution or the life of Siddhartha, for example, one experiences all the dreadful waste of the one and the liberating wonder of the other. Second, the book is wonderfully illustrated by Foster herself. The illustrations are themselves instructive: along with individual scenarios, she provides time-lines, illustrated most fetchingly, that conveniently encapsulate events and persons. Finally, Foster's histories are really world histories. In *Augustus Caesar's World,* she focuses on the events leading up to the end of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Empire (roughly, 44BCE to 14 CE). But she doesn't limit herself to Roman history; she also examines events taking place across the world during the time frame in which she's working: the druids in Gaul, Hindus in India, Confucius in China, Mayans in the Americas, and so on. She even includes intellectual history: the origins of Christianity and Buddhism, the Upanishadic culture of the Hindus, etc. Her aim is to give the reader a wide angle of vision, and she succeeds wonderfully. I'm grateful that Foster's histories are being republished. They don't patronize kids by resorting to silly gimmicks that supposedly make learning more palatable (or at least more marketable). Instead, they make history fascinating the old fashioned way: by showing that it's a great story in its own right. They're a great discovery for my son, and a great rediscovery for me.

Like all the books in this wonderful series, history is presented in such a way that readers realize different people and cultures were co-existing across the world, rather than appearing sequentially. Partially because of how world history is often taught, and partially because of how middle school brains think, ancient history often is understood as one great culture after another sprang into existence from nothing, flourished for a time, then withered away, before another great culture sprang into existence from nothing, and continued the cycle. I was astonished as an adult to realize that many ancient cultures co-existed and influenced each other, unlike how I had grasped history as a young person. This series of books prevents that common but mistaken understanding of history in a very readable and interesting format.

I checked this out from the library to research it as a possible source for our homeschooling library and have had trouble putting it down. It reads like a story and I love the way Foster inserts chapters that let you know what else is going on in the world at the time. My 5 year old son asked me to start reading it aloud to him after learning it was about Ancient Rome, and I was hesitant, concerned that it would be too far above him. But with some summarizing on my part at the end of every few paragraphs and asking him questions to see how well he was tracking, I discovered he really was understanding more than I thought and he was soon hooked. He didn't even want me to stop reading when he got up to use the restroom -- he hollered from down the hall, "Just keep reading loud, Mom, and I can still hear you. I want you to read all the way to the end!" Of course, we didn't finish the whole book in that sitting, but he's asked for it every day since. I look forward to checking out Foster's other histories.

Don't let the title make you think this is just about Augustus Caesar. It's about everything and everyone relatively close to his lifetime. A comprehensive history, this tells more of many individual people and their stories, as well as collective groups/cultures, and in a way that's easy to read and interesting. Even though I knew some of what was in here already, I didn't mind reading about it again in this volume because of the presentation and additional insight and information. Plus, there was much more that I didn't already know. I bought this book to use to wrap up a unit on ancient history in our homeschool. It served that purpose well. However, I will read this book again just for my own pleasure in coming years.