As a kid, I loved history.
But whenever a history book.
I wove the information about the social As a kid, I loved history.
Politics: Again, I have included only major turns of events.
Battles are important, but as a kid - maybe as a girl - I was falling asleep over the Ancient battles.
I have included only accounts of the most major battles, and without much detail.
Anything off-color, or outside traditional-family-friendly morality is not included.
Anything gruesome or seriously cruel is not included.
I have omitted some things, however.
I retold them without adding any fictional color.
To write this book, I went back to Herodotus, Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and other Ancient sources of biographical anecdotes, and extracted from them the stories that will be most memorable to a modern kid.
The suggested reader age for this book is 8 to 14 years old.
And that means historical figures, and anecdotes about them.
Culture is memes.
But if he knows all about the injustices of slavery in Ancient Greece and doesn\'t know who Themistocles was, he will grow up lacking in cultural education.
If my kid remembers who Solon was because he recalls a couple funny anecdotes about him, I know he will put two and two together when he is studying the agricultural subsistence economy of that era down the road in Social Studies.
This book follows the old-fashioned, story-based, traditional route of teaching history - Through the stories of Heroes and kings, with no tribute paid to modern economic and social perspectives.
Because that\'s a memorable story, while the development of agricultural tools is not.
To him, Ancient Greece is Odysseus and the Sirens.
I discovered that my kid remembers minute details of Greek mythology - which is a story-based narrative - and can\'t recall any cities of Ancient Greece, or any historical figures after reading non-fiction on the subject.
They learn from stories, not from dense paragraphs about the phases of the Bronze age, the location of trade routes, or the injustices of the social order here and there.
Whether these are stories of heroism in scary wars, or of the wisdom and intrigue of Ancient kings and rebels, or of the sudden turns of fate that befall fortune-seekers, Kids are always fascinated by a story with a plot.
Kids like stories.
But whenever a history book started a boring dive into the economy, class structure, and archaeological finds of this or that era, I turned off my flashlight and went to sleep.
As a kid, I loved history
