A comic history of...everything!
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The Comic Strip Big Fat Book of Knowledge
by Sally Kindberg and Tracey Turner
(Bloomsbury) £8.99
NO ONE could accuse the writer/illustrator double act behind this volume of a lack of ambition.
"Discover the entire history of the world, the complete history of space and the greatest Greek myths ever told", says the blurb. Surely impossible to deliver on such a promise? In fact they make a pretty decent stab in their highly idiosyncratic way.
Wars, empires, exploding stars and some of the most "grisly and slightly unexpected things to have happened in the last several billion years" are all within the scope of the book.
Written in eye-catching comic strip style with witty (but accurate) blocks of text, the book ranges from "how it all started" throughearly man and ancient Greece to the rise and fall of the Roman empire, the Dark Ages and Vikings. We're introduced to plague, samurai, explorers, pirates and the French revolution through to the Industrial Revolution, the British Empire and the Russian Revolution on to the 21st century and beyond.
The last third of the book is devoted to the great Greek myths, introducing us to everyone from Helen to Hades.
The style is - naturally - very much tongue in cheek although the general thrust of history is present and correct in broad brush strokes.
If you've ever struggled over Einstein's theory of relativity, incidentally, the doodles here are as good a place to start as any... They get from the primordial soup through to dinosaurs and early man over a two-page spread. From the birth of a star to living in space is covered in a section devoted to the history of space.
A lot - an awful lot - is packed into a few hundred pages of what is ultimately a very entertaining, informative and quirky primer.
Hector Mackenzie
