Beautiful book about events in world history with colorful, graphic illustrations. I will definitely add this book to my school library.

I love this book. It takes younger readers on a journey through the history of mankind, from 66 million years ago through the first humans, establishment of cities, the Iron Age, through medical and technological advances to where we are today. Great illustrations help engage readers.

An ambitious and beautifully organized and collected narrative and images to accompany them. A must for young children and young children's classrooms.

This a beautiful colourful loo at human history. This is perfect to read to or read with children. I was blown away with the gorgeous illustrations in the book.

The Story of People by Catherine Barr & Steve Williams is a cute introduction to the timeline of humanity for young readers. With engaging artwork, and easy to follow language, this is the perfect introduction to anthropology! It follows humanity from our earliest incarnations, covering how modern humans evolved, and through the rise of civilisation, up to present day. It covers the good and the bad of human history, not shirking harsh topics like slavery. I read this with my cubs and we all enjoyed it.

***Many thanks to Netgalley & Quarto Publishing for providing an ecopy in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This book is interesting, however I can think of at least 10 reasons why it will either get banned, or not purchased at all. Example, illustrations that show nudity, or semi nudity, when referencing America, the references are all bad, while other countries or skipped over or praised, the fact that it believes in evolution, etc. I personally find nothing wrong with the story, but it very much reminds me of a little kid standing in front of a classroom telling his friends how people were created. It’s the way the book flows. Happy thing, sad thing, happy thing, scary thing. While personally I don’t mind this book, and wouldn't care if someone objected to it, I wouldn’t buy it for my library collection because better books on the same topic exist.

A colourful and accessible introduction to the history of human kind for a young reader. This brilliant picture book condenses thousands of years of human history into 40 short pages, with bright illustrations and child-friendly language and speech bubbles and labels to encourage children to explore the illustrations further.

I particularly liked that the end of the book made the reader consider the impact they are having on the natural world and the message that we all need to take care of the world we live in.

"The Story of People" is a wonderful intro book about human history for young children. It isn't easy to summarize million years of human evolution in 40 pages but the authors managed to squeeze in as much as they could and they retold the tales of our ancestors without being verbose. The beautiful illustrations help children to absorb the information visually making "The Story of People" an awesome read.

The book is written in timeline format covering history from 60 million years ago to present time. The authors neatly divided the information into 14 distinctive historical eras. Each era has two spreads of illustrations and summaries of important milestones that human achieved or disasters they encountered. Since this is a nonfiction book targeting young children, do expect omissions of many other essential events. Nonetheless, "The Story of People" is a good introductory book to education youngsters about human.

P.S. When children are old enough and are ready for more in-depth coverage about human history, the publisher has an advanced version on the topic called "Curiositree: Human World" (ISBN: 9781847809926) which I highly recommend as well.

This book is brightly illustrated and packed full of quirky images and information. It attempts to present an overview of humankind across the world. It’s short so I’d recommend it for you children.

Thank you Francis Lincoln Children's and NetGalley for this review copy. The Story of People is a good introduction to the history of man. It spans from early man through the present day. I appreciated the milestones included such as discoveries, migration, religion, industrial revolution, etc.

As the title states, this is the history of how humans came to be and evolved into what we are today.
You can tell this is for kids when it starts with “A gigantic rock crashed into our planet” instead of “asteroid.”
I love that the handprints from the Lascaux cave are shown here. I also like that it doesn’t shy away from the history of religion, and uses BCE and CE instead of BC and AD. It also describes the Americas after the Europeans arrived as “stolen lands,” and doesn’t mince words telling the story of slavery.
It’s simple, especially the artwork, but it works. Many adults would benefit from this just as much as kids.
4.5 pushed up to 5/5

I love the format and illustrations in this book, and the content looks good, but I was stopped in my tracks by how pinkish-white Homo Sapiens, originating in Africa, looked. Even going for a kind of neutral, could-be-many-different-races, skin tone would have made me keep reading and, if the quality was as high as the first few pages, purchase the book for my library. But that whiteness honestly made my stomach twist. 🙁

A wonderful sequel to The Story of Life and The story of Space, this well-written and beautifully-lllustrated book provides an incredibly conscise introduction to world history. The topics range from pre-history and the spread of the first humans all over the world to recent environmental problems which may have disastrous consequences for our future. The book helps young readers see the big picture, how most important developments (Agricultural and Industrial Revolution, geographic and scientific discoveries, urbanisation) helped to shape our world. It does not shy away from difficult topics such as slavery and religion, which are often omitted from similar texts.
I loved its colourful artwork- it reminded me of the pictures my eight year old pupils produce, the same flight of imagination, the same attention to detail, the same prominence given to what children see as the most important part of the picture.
Thank you to Net Galley and Quarto Publishing Group/ Frances Lincoln Children’s Books for the ARC provided in exchange for an honest opinion.

A very good book that teaches young children about the evolution of humans. The illustrations are wonderfully done and the book explains everything in such a simple way that it is bound to be a hit with your curious young person.

History explained for kids

My son (5 yrs) was recently interested in how humans derived from apes, and although I tried to explain to him the process and that it took thousands of years, he couldn't really understand the concept. This book helped him to visualize what I was trying to explain.

And I think this is the main objective of this book. 'The Story of People' does not aim at being a scientific paper on how mankind evolved from the jungle of Africa to where we are today. It rather provides information on the milestones in this development process that can be discussed further. If you look through this book with a child, you wouldn't only read out the little sentences printed next to the very detailed illustrations, but you would (hopefully) get into a conversation with the child about the short facts that are stated here, which even include topics like slavery and pollution.

This book is a very good aid to help young readers understand certain things that might seem too complex for adults to explain in an appropriate manner.

A nicely illustrated story regarding the history of people. It is simplified for children but also remains factual (noting things like colonialism and not whitewashing things too much).

I absolutely loved the illustrations in this book about how homo sapiens.started out of Africa, became farmers, discovered iron. The Greek and Romans, the Crusades, slave trade to the New World, scientific discoveries, the Industrial Revolution, and robots.

Two million years of human evolution in a nutshell, a very small nutshell.

What a beautiful book!

This book was the perfect reading level for my 7 year old son. It is the perfect mix of interesting illustrations, and informative information. This book hit on many important points that we are trying to teach our children such as respecting the earth, and respecting other humans around the world. It is everything I wanted for a low-grade non-fiction.

I have immediately added this book on to the "MUST BUY" list for my children's library and look forward to sharing it with children for many years to come.

Amazing work!

This was a beautifully illustrated book that shows how homosapiens developed through time from the beginning until now. I like that religion was mentioned but I think there probably needed to be a little more in that area as far as this book goes. I think this book is just short enough and uses simple to understand language for kids to learn more about humans.

The Story of People promises to deliver an ambitious goal--summarize the history of humankind on earth in a book digestible for children--and it does an amazing job parsing two million years into around forty pages.

Barr and Williams begin when dinosaurs went extinct but small mammals survived the asteroid that killed so much life on earth. From there, readers learn about hunter and gatherer societies, the formation of towns, trade, the development of government, the influence of religion, to the industrial revolution, and today’s amazing technological developments.

They don’t shy away from difficult topics such as the slave trade, war, and climate change, though their message is one of cooperation and hopefulness.

Completed in a style I particularly like, Amy Husband’s illustrations are somewhat cartoon-like, colorful, playing with perspective, and with new details every time you look at the page.

The book includes a running timeline and a helpful glossary.

For an audience of six-to-nine-year-olds, The Story of People does deliver a full, though concise history that will also certainly inspire questions and provoke discussion. A must for libraries, this is also a great book to have at home.