![]() They’ll also learn about the university of Jundi Shapur, which flourished fifteen hundred years ago in what is now Iran and which sounds so wondrous I can’t believe I’d never heard of it before. Readers will learn far more about Olaudah Equiano, an enslaved African taken to Barbados to work in sugar, or even Thomas Thistlewood, a white overseer who wrote with a kind of nauseating jocularity about the cruelties he inflicted on his charges. The longest passage by far is only fifty-seven words. Christopher Columbus gets mentioned, for example, on three separate pages. Relatively uninterested in kings and politicians, this is more of a Howard Zinn-style people’s history, albeit one which far more gently grinds its axe. Judge Adam Rex had some glowing things to say about it: Sugar Changed the World was knocked out in the first round, but it was up against the eventual winner, so that loss was no disgrace. I also have two holds that have just come in for books that I decided to read because of the coverage in the Battle. I have two more books to review from School Library Journal’s Battle of the Kids’ Books. ![]() A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science ![]()
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