Product Description

Thousands of years--way before Christopher Columbus set sail--wandering tribes of hunters made their way from Asia across the Bering land bridge to North America. They didn't know it, but they had discovered a New World. The First Americans is a fascinating re-creation of pre-Columbian Native American life, and it's an adventure of a lifetime! Hunt seals with the Inuit; harvest corn on a cliff-top mesa; hunt the mighty buffalo; and set sail with Leif Erickson, Columbus, and all the early great explorers--Cabot, Balboa, Ponce de Leon, Cortes, Henry the Navigator, and more--in this brilliantly told story of America before it was America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105638 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of John Adams
"A big breath of fresh air and the best possible news for the youngsters who get to read them."

Dr. Sonya Friedman, CNN
"An incredible look at who we were when this country began."

Card catalog description
Presents the history of the Native Americans from earliest times through the arrival of the first Europeans.

Customer Reviews

The first americans
The worst service I have ever received. The order was placed accidentally by my daughter and I contacted customer service to cancel the order and they told me they cannot cancel the order after 30 mins of order placement. This is crazy.

Incredibly well written!
I wish this text had been available when I was in school.

First of all, it is not in the slightest bit boring. It's so well written.

Second, unlike so many histories of America intended for our kids, it starts at the real beginning with the ancient civilizations of America - not only Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas, but the amazing Chaco Canyon and Mississippian city-states as well, along with the farming village cultures and hunter-gatherers that lived all over our continent. This in contrast to even an otherwise pretty good ancient history storybook, like Susan Bauer's Story of the World, in which Ms. Bauer gives the impression that all ancient North Americans were nomads wandering around aimlessly (a glaring error).

Third, when it comes to Columbus and the Spanish Conquistadors, she neither glorifies the conquerors nor the conquered. She tells the good, the bad, and the ugly, on both sides.

Why I didn't give it five stars: I'm sorry, but I don't think we should go overboard in teaching kids to be part of a fan-club for the US government. She just raves about how protected we are from bad government, saying things like "even the President has to obey" the constitution because he can be impeached. Hmmm. I'll just leave everyone to decide on their own whether they agree with that - I found it unbelievably naive.

One other glaring thing I read was her comment that the Plains Indians became wasteful with the buffalo. Since I'm not an historian, I could be missing some information, and maybe the Indians did get less thrifty - I don't know, it's certainly not what I was taught elsewhere. But to state that without putting it into context - which is that non-Indians, including our government, systematically wiped out the buffalo as a tool to reduce the Indians ability to fight for their land - I found very objectionable. (More evidence of the naive fan club mentality about our government?)

Even with those caveats, because ALL historians have biases and errors in their work, I'm still loving this and finding it the best kids history of the US I've ever seen!

All kids' books should be this good.
I thought my 4-year-old was only half listening as I read "The First Americans" to her sister (age 6). But the other evening at story time, her face lit up and she begged for "history"! I can give it no higher praise.

This volume covers the first 12,000 years--give or take a few millennia--of human life on our continent. Hakim strikes a good balance between outlining the broad sweep of the period, and focusing in on interesting stories, people, and trivia ("fun facts" in my girls' lingo). She doesn't gloss over difficult subjects, such as the massacre of the Aztecs by the Spaniards under Cortés. But she relates these events with balance and sympathy, helping her young readers to understand them from different points of view (in this case the Aztecs; their neighbors who were victims of cruel Aztec rituals; and the Spaniards who wanted Aztec gold, but also were abhorred by Aztec viciousness towards their neighbors). What's more, Hakim openly invites them to think about and even reject her own judgements.

She has sparked many good conversations in our household. For instance, she used the example of Cortés to illustrate some tough ethical questions that philosophers debate to this day. I talked about these questions with my daughters, and helped them to express and refine their own thoughts. Then I invited them to think up some other tough questions. My younger one took the cake with "what is 'is'?". She had offered it in jest, but to her surprise I pulled out "Being and Time", one of several big books on my shelf devoted to that very question. She was amused, but quite pleased.

No doubt you will find something to disagree with in this, as in any good history. When that happens, do what the author suggests: use it as an opportunity to debate her conclusions with your kids, and sharpen their critical skills. For the rest of it, enjoy a great story well-told. I can hardly imagine a better history for this age group.