The Adventures of Marco Polo by Russell Freedman

Marco Polo told people that he saw snakes with legs.  I have never heard of snakes with legs so this makes me question if he made up a lot about an adventure he went on. However, he could have seen another creature and called it the wrong name.  I was always told in school that Marco Polo was an early explorer.  This book is making me question if that is really true.  I finished the book and the author still questions if Marco Polo was a fraud.  I was hoping to find out the answer at the end of the book and that did not happen.  The author states that his discoveries are still debated today but that he has changed the way that many people think about the world.  I would not recommend this book because it was very boring to me.  I had a difficult time reading and understanding the book because of the language.  The pictures included in the book were not very interesting to me and did not add to the story.  I think that in order to really understand the book it would be necessary to have a lot of background knowledge of Marco Polo and how life was like back then for the early explorers.  The book does not really include any elements of adventure or excitement.  The book did not make me interested and if it doesn't interest me I don't think it will interest my students.  This book was in the library under Juvenile Biography but I think that it would be too difficult for children to read the book.  I would have placed the book under an adult biography section.  The part that I liked most about the book were the large maps that were included and how it helped show the distance traveled.  I am still having a difficult time understanding where Marco Polo traveled because I haven't learned much about Europe, India and China.  I think one of the main reasons for why the author wrote the book was to give children information about Marco Polo and to have the readers question if he really saw everything that he claims he did.  Back then there was no way to validate if someone really traveled where they said they did.  If it was written in books people believed that it was true.  There is nothing in the book that I can relate to and I think that is part of the reason why I did not like it very much.  Children have a difficult time relating to things that happened a long time ago and I feel that this book will be difficult for them to relate to because of that.  I would not use this book in my classroom unless I was teaching high school students that had background knowledge about that time period.