Product Description

This is a fun, informative, chronological guide to the history of world explorers. The book begins with the ancient explorers, such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, through to Magellan and Drake, and comes right up to the present day with Ranulph Fiennes. Each page puts an explorer in the context of his or her own time, with details of other important contemporary events and figures, the new inventions which were the springboards for their adventures, and the world regions which were capturing people's imagination at that time. Gillian Clements includes the reasons behind exploration, and how technology and exploration have gone hand-in-hand throughout history. She combines entertaining fact and historical information with eye-catching illustration.

Product Details

• Published on: 2009-08-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

From Booklist
Gr. 2-4. Beginning with the first prehistoric explorers and moving through recent explorations of space, this short introduction covers a wide variety of figures. Some names are well known: Leif Eriksson, Francis Drake, and Thor Heyerdahl. But many lesser-known explorers are introduced as well. William Jansz found trading opportunities for the Dutch East India Company in the 1600s, and Hugh Clapperton explored Africa in the early nineteenth century. The two to three paragraphs of information per subject are probably insufficient for school reports, and the few maps do not provide enough assistance for pupils. But this highly visual book (with an illustrated time line running along the bottom of the page) will attract browsers, and it is rare to find a book so comprehensive in terms of the men (and a few women) who wanted to see what was around the next bend. A glossary is appended. Linda Perkins
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About the Author
Gillian Clements studied Illustration under Raymond Briggs at Brighton Polytechnic. Frances Lincoln published Gillian's first book in this series A Picture History of Great Inventors in 2000.