Reference Reviews

Doug’s Student Reference Room

The Modern World, edited by Sarolta Takács. 5 vols, 800 p. Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference. ISBN: 978-0-7656-8096-9. $399.00.

One of the challenges in offering reference materials to younger students is to select and distill topics into entries in a way that preserves their complexity. Too often works exploring the culture and history of a group are reduced to celebrations of food and clothing, glosses of important political leaders, and summaries of key conflicts in major wars. This five-volume set targets readers grades 6 through 9 and achieves partial success in its goal of offering a “deeper appreciation of the changes throughout history that have helped to form the modern world.” Some of the difficulty stems from the broad scope of the collection in its definition of “modern.” Entries range from the early middle ages to 2008. The major regions of the world are divided among five volumes, each 160 pages in length, which places challenging constraints on lengths of some entries. The section on the literature of Europe, for example, spans 1,000 years in just seven pages, leaving room for little else than mentions of key authors and works. Curiously, the sole author featured in a photo for this entry is J.K. Rowling. Each volume includes a five or six page entry entitled “Culture and Traditions,” which attempts to generalize about aspects of culture such as marriage, children, elders, and urban life across one or more entire continent. The broad strokes necessitated here make it difficult to see how the information might be useful to either teachers or students. The omissions are problematic as well. Not all countries are given their own entries; in the volume on the Middle East and Southwest Asia, for example, only Iran, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen merit separate entries as countries. There is an entry for the current war between Iraq and the United States but no entry specifically on the country of Iraq. Africa’s countries are, proportionally, even less well represented. What this collection does well, on the other hand, is to cover broad political and social movements in a concise way that is accessible to younger students. In the volume on Africa, particularly effective are the discussions of colonization, the slave trade, imperialism, and independence movements. The volume about Europe offers concise summaries of the importance of the Crusades, reformation, nationalism, communism, and fascism. The volume on the Americas provides good overviews of colonization, immigration, revolution, religion, and social reform. The Middle East and Southwest Asia volume effectively covers the Byzantine Empire, Islam, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, nationalism, independence movements, and the increasing influence of oil. The volume on Asia and the Pacific provides helpful entries on communism, nationalism, and religion. Easy-to-read timelines and color maps are plentiful; sidebars on key leaders, historical turning points, and looks into the 21st century highlight important aspects of some entries. Each alphabetically arranged entry includes cross-references and a few suggestions for further reading. A glossary of key terms, a selected bibliography and an index conclude each volume. Though uneven, there is enough quality material here to warrant purchase as a supplementary resource for world culture and geography research in grades 6-9.
—Doug Achterman