New O'Reilly Children's Book

[L Verge]

I purchased O'Reilly's "children's" book, Lincoln's Last Days, online for about $11, and it arrived today. As has been said here before, the front cover alone will make it hop off the shelf into one's hands. The designer knows that the cover is all-important to getting a customer lured into buying.

The wealth of period illustrations inside is also a significant plus. Including various appendices and the index, it is over 300 pages.

That said, it appears to be aimed at Grades 5-8 and carries that through nicely by using present tense to make it more appealing, spacing the lines of text so that it is easily read, scattering the illustrations throughout the book to make sure they are on or near the appropriate subjects they are illustrating, and including an opening note that describes the Key Players and appendices that include Lincoln's World (with a walk through D.C. of the 1860s), a section on the Lincoln family, important facts about the Civil War, sections on Civil War weapons, flags, transportation, and medicine, a Lincoln Timeline, and more.

Now for the sad part: IMO, the 240 pages of text makes it a little long for the average student to want to read. My twelve-year-old grandson could give tours at Surratt House and loves James Swanson's Chasing Mr. Lincoln's Killer - but I doubt he would ever finish this book. Mistakes are still there in watered-down versions of what was stumbled over in Killing Lincoln, and this is what made me the worst mad!

Killing Lincoln got panned from the very beginning for its style and substance. From amateur historians to the academicians, the authors and publishers heard about the errors. They had time to listen and to correct these errors in this book -- and they didn't. Do publishers even have fact checkers and editors in their employ anymore? I used to get several calls a year from such people checking on the reliability of manuscripts and articles that had been submitted for publication. I don't anymore. There is also a little thing known as peer review; is that ever used?

O'Reilly claims to have once been a high school history teacher. To have flubbed up on the original book says a lot, but to have been admonished about your "teaching" of history and turn around within six months and produce a student's version that still has silly errors is unforgivable in the eyes of this old middle school teacher of history and government (who also sat on several textbook review panels in her day).

You have now earned two C-'s in my book, Mr. O'Reilly and Henry Holt & Company.