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Heritage History Intermediate Readers Collection CD-ROM |
| Publisher:
Heritage History |
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| Reviewed
By: Zandra Owen |
Old books make for wonderful history lessons. For one thing, you're getting history closer to the source, a hundred years closer, or more. For another, the sort of old books that have survived and continue to be enjoyed are survivors for a reason: Their authors are good storytellers.
Not too many years ago, being able to read This Country of Ours or The Boys Book of Sea Fights entailed finding the books in a dusty corner of an old book shop or antique store, or making a lucky discovery in a trunk in your grandfather's attic. Today you don't have to depend on such luck. More and more of these books are becoming available in reprinted editions or on Internet archives.
The Heritage History company has made it a mission to seek out these old books and make them available on CD-ROM in PDF format. The pages are clean and crisp, containing the original illustrations. The format runs in a browser window, so that each book in the CD library is just a click away. Access within the books is incredibly easy: You can scroll through pages or use thumbnails to jump to any page. This also makes it simple to print any page or range of pages. (Permission to print pages for personal and educational use is granted to the purchaser.)
Heritage History's CD-ROMs have several advantages to reading books from an Internet archive. First, you don't have to have an Internet connection at all. If you have a slow connection speed, you know about having to wait for a download, but there's no waiting with a CD-ROM. Some Internet archives give you a chapter at a time, but with the CD-ROM, you have access to entire books at a time. Another nice feature of some of the books on the CD-ROM: You can jump to any chapter just by clicking on an entry in a book's Table of Contents. You can also use the search feature to search for any word or phrase within a book.
The Intermediate Readers Collection contains a number of books and authors we've come to know and enjoy over the years. The first title to jump out at me was This Country of Ours by H.E. Marshall, which we read in our early years following Ambleside Online's reading list. While perusing the list of titles I noticed more books by H.E. Marshall, as well as other authors we've come to enjoy: James Baldwin, Andrew Lang, Padraic Colum, and M.B. Synge among them. Then there are books and authors that sound familiar, that I look forward to getting to know. Perhaps you've heard of some of them, like John Finnemore, Robert Van Bergen, Paul du Chaillu (his stories of exploring Africa in the 1800s are fascinating!), Charles R. Gibson, and more.
This collection contains 60 books in all, nearly 7,000 pages, of the kinds of books my grandfather read in his boyhood. These were the books that fired his interest in history, the books whose stories he told his children and grandchildren in years to come. These are books that our active children will sit and listen to, for as long as I care to read aloud (hours, sometimes, or until my voice gets hoarse), and because the stories are vividly written, the children can re-tell the stories with drama and enthusiasm. These are the kinds of books that bring history to life, that make people and events of the past relevant and memorable, that help to make history our favorite subject.
Note: As these are books written a hundred years ago, or more, you'll find historical references that today's readers might consider offensive, such as “Redmen,” “red man,” “savages,” “negro,” and “colored people,” along with dialogue written in dialect. |
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| More
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| Available
From: Heritage History |
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Address: P. O. Box 901, Newman Lake, WA 99025 |
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| Website:
www.heritage-history.com/ |
| Email:
customerservice@heritage-history.com |
| Cost:
$30.00 CD-ROM |
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Zandra Owen
Busy homeschool mom who lives smack-dab in the middle of the madding crowd. |
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| Copyright
© 2009 Eclectic Homeschool Association |
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