Lewis and Clark: Explorers of the American West

In adapting and condensing a sprawling real-life adventure for a juvenile audience, this book unfortunately seems to take much of the excitement out of the story. One wonders if the text and illustrations might actually work okay by themselves -- just not in the same book together.The illustrations appear to be oil paintings, using a fairly consistent (monotonous) range of muted earth tones. Most are done in square format and printed "full bleed," one per page (no margins). As a result, most times that you look at two facing pages, you are fooled into thinking that you're looking at two parts of a single wide illustration. They just blend into each other, and generally don't seem to capture much drama.If the paintings had more visual variety, or clung more closely to the text, that might not happen. But as it is, the two elements do not seem to hang together. The text is detailed enough to be interesting to an older (3rd grade or higher) student, but the simplistic picture-book approach might make it less appealing to such kids. Meanwhile, all those details will be overwhelming (or boring) to a younger reader.Another review here mentions some concerns about factual accuracy, regarding one very small part of the expedition's long itinerary. Frankly, I would not get so excited over that, considering the audience. I don't think any children will be grabbing this volume and running off to use it as a guidebook in retracing the steps of Lewis and Clark.Of more concern is whether such details (like specific choices of routes, or names of valleys and rivers and whatnot) have any place at all, in a book with such a simplistic and distracting visual approach. Or, instead, whether the pictures ought to be smaller and more numerous, so that they illustrate all the many episodes of this adventure more faithfully.We got this as part of Amazon's 3-for-4 promotion, in hopes of getting a fact-based story, at the elementary school level, at a bargain price. Well, I think one might be better off spending more money and choosing from one of the zillions of other books on this topic. I haven't looked yet, but I can't help thinking that somebody, somewhere must have done this better.

Great reading, outstanding illustrations; but, grossly too short with too many "gaps" in this historical venture. A must library have!

I owned the hardcover book. The large print and big illustrations are awesome. I was able to used it for a history lesson for a kindergarten child. The story was simple but factual.

This was a great "research" book for our second grader that had to do a report on the Westward Movement.

good

Love the pictures!

Great price and great condition

thanks