This is a really great book to get children interested in history. Mr. Roop makes the voyage of Columbus very interesting and very easy to read for kids. For introducing history to kids, I would really get this book.

This is the Bicentennial edition of a book that was first published in 1953 as It All Started With Columbus. In fifty five hilarious chapters, Armour has written a very funny parody of an American History textbook complete with Test Questions, Mid-Term Projects, and a Glossary of Terms. It covers the period from Christopher Columbus to Gerald Ford. Too bad he stopped updating the book and missed the opportunity to chronicle the comic adventures of Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes. Fortunately, our generation has Larry Gonick's Cartoon Histories which are the closest modern writings that compare to this book. Armour's style is based upon puns at which he is a master. Like Gonick, he is a Ph.D. scholar. While Gonick was a scientist, Armour got his Ph. D. from Harvard and is an historian. His approach is humorous but is well grounded. Take a look at this satiric commentary on the classic American textbook and enjoy a good laugh.

This is a biography of an obscure figure from the American Civil War who had a famous name. Jefferson Columbus Davis was no relation to the Confederate president, and stayed loyal to the Union, rising the the rank of brevet Major General. He's probably best known as the culprit in the murder of William Nelson, another Union army general, in 1862. There was, however, more to Jefferson C. Davis than that, as this admirable biography shows.

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Jefferson C. Davis was from Indiana. He enlisted in the army young, and participated in the battle of Buena Vista as a private in his Indiana volunteer regiment, distinguishing himself so much that he was considered for an appointment to West Point. When that fell through, Davis was directly enlisted in the regular army as a second lieutenant of artillery, and spent the years between the Mexican war and Fort Sumter studying and learning to be a soldier. He was part of the garrison of Fort Sumter, and this notoriety positioned him for a brigade command of Indiana state troops. He led them through the battle of Pea Ridge, and never looked back, concluding the war in command of the Fourteenth Corps during the March through the Carolinas, and during the battle of Bentonville. After the war, he was Alaska's first military district commander, and briefly fought the Modocs on the California-Oregon border.

The authors do a wonderful job of bringing Davis, and his many contradictions, to life. He was a demanding soldier, and a hard taskmaster, but he appears to have generally been a fair and decent person. There is the one incident where he shot Nelson dead, but the authors lay out the course of events, and frankly the whole thing sounds provoked. Nelson was disliked by a lot of people, apparently, to the point that when he was shot, there weren't very many calls for his killer to be brought to justice. The whole thing is laid out in considerable detail. And where Davis emerges as a surprise is in his competence as a soldier. Though his troops were routed at both Stones River and Chickamauga, at Pea Ridge it was Davis who stopped Louis Hebert's attack on the Union left, and at Jonesboro it was Davis who broke the Confederate front. At Bentonville he again held off the main Confederate assault, though with some help. Frankly I was surprised: he turns out to have been a pretty good general, and generally well-liked by the troops, even though he *never* praised anyone for anything, and apparently thought bravery nothing extraordinary. In his defense, he was brave himself.

There is one shortcoming in this book. There is a lack of maps to illustrate the text. The authors try to detail battlefield maneuvers from Buena Vista to Bentonville, with no tactical maps at all, and only three general area maps, none of which are particularly helpful. Only one of the maps even deals with the Civil War. This unfortunately makes the text a bit hard to follow at times. Other than that, I would highly recommend this book for the Civil War scholar. It's definitely worth the money.

The Ottoman naval commander and cartographer Piri Reis (1475-1554) played a leading role in transmitting the discoveries made on Columbus' first voyage to the New World to the inhabitants of the Muslim lands around the Mediterranean. His work is known from fragments of two world maps, and from his Kitab-i-Bahriye (Book of Seamanship), which he illustrated with hundreds of charts derived principally from medieval portolans. The Khalili Portolan Atlas is a fine, hand-drawn example of the cartographic tradition established by Piri Reis. It also contains a series of city views, including unprecedented depictions of Galata, on the northern shore of the Golden Horn, and of Candia in Crete, which reflect the vitality of Ottoman topographical painting in the late 17th centure. Professor Soucek shows how Piri Reis' works represented a fusion of the Islamic world view with European map-making traditions, modified by his own experience as a navigator, and by the recent discoveries of Columbus. The third part of his study is devoted to a detailed analysis of the contents of the Khalili Portolan Atlas.

If only this book had been there when my father died. In spite of a closeknit, supportive family, my tremendous grief was largely retained inside me. The book contains such sublime images, such absorbing and affecting stories, along with calming exercises. A woman need not be widowed to gain a world of healing from it. It is a unique and fascinating reading experience, and will remain a permanently among my most valued books. For let us be realistic, in life there will be grief, and here is a most wonderful source of comfort.

Mariner is a wonderful dark drama with areas of comedy portraying the life of Columbus not in the history books. The play begins at his death on the wreck on the Santa Maria and is being placed on trial by Torquemada, for all the injustices he committed to get where he is in history. You'll take a trip through different lands, states of life, and learn about the many people Columbus (according to the playwright)uses and abuses. I have both read and performed this piece. And,it is an incredibly strong piece.

I discovered this book while browsing for quality literature to bring to my classroom. I read this book because it fits my third grade curriculum and has a low reading level. Meet Christopher Columbus is an excellent introduction to biographies and explorers. The format of the book allows for less experienced readers to read small parts of his life without being overwhelmed. The language is simple enough for children to comprehend the main idea and details presented without difficulty. The history is accurate and presented in a logical fashion. I recommend this to parents and teachers to help students learn about Columbus as well as improve their reading!

Historian Frederick J. Pohl shakes up the common conceptions of the man known to the world as Christopher Columbus in this biography, published in 1986. If you haven't studied Columbus since this time, you may not know Columbus at all.

Pohl submits that the man who sailed under the name Christopher Columbus was born Juan Colon on the island of Majorca, son of a Jewish mother and an absent, dispossessed nobleman. As a result, Colon spent his life seeking the kind of power that had been denied the father he never knew. Convinced that finding a shorter trade route to India would mean wealth and power to its discoverer, Colon began a long public relations campaign to thus cash in on his abilities as navigator and ship's captain. Unable to get the Portugese to finance his expedition, he was forced to turn to Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain, but, since his family was still outlawed from a failed revolt years earlier, he was forced to assume the identity of a Genoese merchant whom he knew had died at sea: Cristoforo Colombo. Pohl describes Colon's career in fascinating detail, including all of the so-called voyages of discovery, and even goes into the successes of Americo Vespucci at some length.

While it is not this reviewer's intention to pass critical judgement on Pohl's scholarship, the very outrageousness of some of these claims inclines one to wonder about their veracity. The notes at the end of the book clearly show that there are and always have been many unanswered questions about Columbus, and the net effect of this book may be more confusing (and sensationalist) than enlightening. The first couple of chapters weren't particularly good; the story was disjointed and episodic, and the positioning of the maps further on in the book, combined with the subject's unfamiliar name, make this section disconcertingly cryptic: "Where is Majorca? Who is this Juan Colon? Where in blazes is Castile? Why aren't we talking about Columbus?" While the solutions to these questions are eventually presented (in one form or another) Pohl should probably have been more forthright from the beginning instead of trying to spring surprises on his readers. After all, this book is being read in a country where three out of ten students can't find Canada on a map, let alone Navarre. All this aside, Pohl presents us with an entertaining account of one man's extraordinary life in relatively simple, straight-forward language. If you're interested in this period of history, and you're ready for a radically different viewpoint on this famous explorer, Pohl's book is worth discovering.

"The People Who Discovered Columbus" is a well-researched account of those first peoples who actually discovered The Bahamas, where they came from, how they lived and why they came.

Keegan paints a vivid picture of the Bahama Island chain in those years prior to the arrival of the first human inhabitants, describing the lush, untouched landscape like a tropical Eden into which comes man, probably migrating from the south of the Bahamian archipelago. His theory about the motivation for this migration still holds true for tourists today: The Bahamas is just too attractive a location to pass up.

This book is also a treasure for anyone interested in Caribbean archaeology. Although, since the book's publication, many more aboriginal sites have been discovered, this book lists, island by island, the number and types of sites that provide evidence of intense Lucayan habitation. From open air sites to caves, Keegan leads the reader through The Bahamas, walking in the footsteps of those ancient people.

Reading this book, you begin to question, as Keegan does, whether Columbus' motivation for his 1492 voyage was to actually get to the Indies or the much more personal goal of territorial conquest.

This book is a must read if you want to really experience the Bahama Islands of those centuries long before Columbus. I would recommend it unreservedly as a well written, well documented book that, in spite of its scholarly value, is quite easy and enjoyable to read. It certainly puts to shame the theory that Columbus could have discovered a whole nation of people - complete with customs, traditions and history - who were never lost in the first place!

The theory of Columbus being a Portuguese Jew and a spy for the Portuguese king against the Spanish king is very interesting. For that reason I give the book a 4-star rating. I want to discuss the theory in more detail, but first this: it seems the author is not 100% fluent in English. Or perhaps the book was poorly translated from Portuguese, although the inside cover does not state that it's a translation.

The book contains many punctuation and sentence structure errors. Also, the author seems to throw in lewd sexual remarks whenever he can. It's a turnoff from serious reading. But both these problems were minor and easily overcome.

The book is very interesting. It makes me want to go out and buy more books, but this time on the Catalan theory and more on the Portuguese theory, but written by an objective non-Portuguese author.

The author presents very compelling arguments purporting that Columbus could not have been Genoese. This, coupled with the fact that Columbus' early life is sketchy, leaves doubt in my mind that Columbus was Genoese. Either way, I'm not sure that it is an honor to have Columbus as one of your own. Didn't Columbus and others "rape" the indigenous peoples of the places they discovered and colonized? This is a good book for history buffs.