UNSTOPPABLE US, VOLUME 1

From the author of the adult title Sapiens (2015), an explanation of how physically weak humans came to dominate other animals.

Spoiler alert: It was through human inventiveness and storytelling. Harari’s lively, reader-directed prose and Ruiz’s expressive graphics will help young readers grasp an almost-unimaginably distant past, from the start of toolmaking up to (in this volume) Homo sapiens’ collaborative extinction of mammoths. The text is dramatically punctuated by large and small illustrations. Ingenious use of perspective, imaginative details, and relevance to the text make the artwork integral to this book’s appeal. Most of the illustrations depict cheerful, brown-skinned humans. Bolded sentences in different colors break up text blocks and point to big ideas and questions. Humor is effectively deployed, and concepts like evolution, DNA, and religion are compared to kid-adjacent phenomena (to help kids grapple with the idea of human cooperation, for instance, the author asks readers to imagine all the people, from students to teachers to cafeteria workers to the people who create textbooks, who make a school possible), connected to the next topic, and paced to appeal to middle-grade readers. When an answer isn’t known, Harari admits, “We don’t know.”

An enticingly depicted intro to human history and archaeology, simply expressed but extensive and engaging.