The Presidential Masters of Prehistory: Discover America's Prehistoric Forefathers

K-Gr 4—Lacey presents the lives of six U.S. presidents as if they were dinosaurs governing "prehistoric America." Each subject receives four pages and a minibook devoted to facts about the dinosaur leader, followed by a spread on the human president that repeats many of the same points but with the actual dates and place names. In each dinosaur section, Isik depicts the presidents as cartoonish green-skinned lizards with large round eyes and toothy snouts, upright and clothed. (Though the presidents are identified as different types of dinosaurs in the text, each portrayal is about the same, distinguished only by differences in attire and hairstyle.) The effort to set U.S. historical events into a fanciful prehistory is sometimes strained, as when the Great Depression is presented as the "Great Ice Age," a time when President Franklin D. Rex put unemployed dinos to work "building canals to help lava flow to cold areas." Some omission of facts means that presidents (dinosaur and human) can be shown in the most favorable light. For instance, the human president Andrew Jackson is said to have been "tough enough to survive life in the Wild West—and the jungle of politics" but no mention is made of his policies and actions toward American Indians. The text contains a few errors (e.g., the year of George Washington's death), and although Lacey includes some quotations, there are no source notes.