The Explorer's Handbook: How to Become an Intrepid Traveler

A fact-filled treasure trove of how to become an explorer provides easy-to-follow instructions for making a compass, a survival kit, and a sea chest, and suggests such activities as baking spice cookies and creating an Aztec mask.

Grade 4-6-Books about explorers tend to give routes, tell of discoveries, provide biographical details, and discuss the results of expeditions. The Explorer's Handbook, however, is designed to encourage budding adventurers with concise and intriguing vignettes, directions for making useful equipment (e.g., a compass and a treasure chest), advice on how to navigate by the stars, and several interactive sidebars. The text invites children to visit the time of Queen Hatshepsut, sail with Magellan, slog through Africa with Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, and freeze at the ends of the Earth with the explorers of the North and South Poles. Factual material, full-color archival reproductions and photographs, and excerpts from journals entice the imagination. A quiz determines whether or not readers are "fearless and a little crazy," thus having the character to be an explorer, or would be better off sticking with being a tour guide or an armchair traveler. Just enough information is included to entice children to find out more. Oddly enough for a book of this type, there are no maps. Equally attractive to browsers or teachers looking for something to spark interest, this is an engaging addition that compliments Rupert Matthews's Explorer (Knopf, 1991).
Kathryn Kosiorek, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Brooklyn, OH
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A combination history and activity book covers exploration from ancient Egypt through the era of the Vikings, Marco Polo, the European discovery of the New World, the conquest of the Aztecs, Africa, and more, all the way up to the space age. Every chapter includes an activity of some sort: making an Aztec mask, sea chest, and survival kit, taking an explorer quiz, and finding the North Star. In creating a history book, Tolhurst (Somebody and the Three Blairs, 1991) succeeds in presenting a lot of material simply and clearly; the book is well-designed, with plenty of full-color illustrations. The title is glib, however, for readers won't learn how to become explorers, and some of the activities are forced, or too briefly explained to be meaningful. For readers, perhaps, rather than doers. (Nonfiction. 7-10) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.