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Plumfield Press has started republishing some of the United States True Book series that are in the public domain. These are books intended for early readers, simultaneously teaching them facts about nature and giving them reading skills. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, Frederick Muller LTD, a publisher in London, produced the United Kingdom True Book series. The UK series had a wider range of topics and were focused on middle school readers, with challenging content and interesting illustrations. I could not find out much else about this series, unfortunately, but the back of book to be reviewed below gives some of the titles and authors.
The True Book of Castles by Henry Treece is a fine example of this series. Henry Treece was a famous author of historical novels for children, usually set in ancient or medieval times. Therefore, he was a great choice to be the author of this book, both in technical knowledge and in writing ability. Treece spends two chapters on the history and development of fortresses or castles, a few chapters on what life was like living in a castle, and then gives more detailed look at famous castles and the interesting history surrounding their most famous moments. There are many illustrations and diagrams, helping the reader to better understand how castles were laid out and built. This book can be read straight though. It was originally intended to be at a middle school reading level but a high school student (or an adult) would not be bored with it.
Daily Life in the Middle Ages, by Paul B. Newman, is a comprehensive look at what daily life was like in the Middle Ages, which he defines as taking place from about 500 AD to 1485 AD. The author admits that most of the material in the book focuses more on the second half of the Middle Ages, from about 1000 AD to 1485 AD. Newman makes the point in his introduction that another name for the Middle Ages was also the Dark Ages. However, the facts presented in this book show that there was nothing dark about the Middle Ages, which instead was a time of steady growth and progress. The book is set up to be a reference book in which it is easy to access information about whatever the reader is interested in. The detailed index is another way to be steered to learning about the place, person, or thing of interest to the reader. There are some pen and ink illustrations, which are helpful, but I would have liked there to have been more of these. The text is clear and gives a lot of insight into medieval trends and materials. Overall, a very good reference book for the upper middle school to high school reading level student.