By Myrtle Langley
A big photographic survey of religious belief across the whole world and all of history, from ancient Egypt to the major living faiths of today.
The classic DK Eyewitness format turned on religion: big pages, sharp photographs of real objects and places, and short blocks of text you can read in any order. It ranges wide. It starts with ancient religions like those of Egypt and Greece, moves through belief systems of peoples around the world, then takes the living faiths one at a time: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It's an outside survey. It explains what each tradition believes and does without endorsing or ranking any of them, and it doesn't assume your family follows one faith or none. Where a picture book shows one child's religion up close, this shows the whole sweep: sacred objects, holy places, rituals, and the different answers traditions have given to the largest questions, including what happens after death.
It's the widest net on the shelf. It reaches back to ancient religions and out to living faiths a picture book rarely touches, all through the photographs and real objects that make DK's Eyewitness books easy to fall into. For older, capable readers, that range is the whole appeal, and they can go from an Egyptian tomb to a Sikh gurdwara in a few page-turns and start to see how varied human belief is. It's built to dip into, not read cover to cover, which makes it a good fit for independent research or a station a child works through on their own.