The Human Race is a wonderful reference book, especially for homeschooling in use of helping write timelines in a book of centuries. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my digital review copy.

A fascinating illustrated compendium that introduces children to a huge variety of human accomplishments throughout history. Some of the areas of focus: physical accomplishments, race to space, science, and technology. Each topic has a brief overview as the audience for this book is middle-upper elementary school aged children. This would be a wonderful starting point to pick a school project or simply to pore over in fascination!

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for providing this ARC.

I loved the way the information was presented and the variety of races it covered. It kept us busy pouring over all the facts for some time. It even had us looking up and researching to learn more.

Such a fantastic book on racing & I don't just mean fast cars. We get an educational look at not only every kind of racing but the actual racers! We get information on The Olympics, Car Racing, Different Historical Journeys & Expeditions completed by Explorers (with mini bios on the explorers too). We Learn about different modes of transportation & The science of movement within our bodies as well as how technology plays a role in The Human Race. Overall a great educational book & I would totally gift this to a science teacher for their classroom!!

I received an electronic ARC from Quarto Publishing Group – QEB Publishing through NetGalley.
Callery takes readers through the race to create, to push ourselves, to travel faster and to be the best. Each page spread shows readers the history behind the covered topic. Callery shares well researched facts, background and sidebar information on each category. The text is presented in short paragraph and bullet formats to hold middle grader interest. Colorful illustrations and graphics support the information provided.

This is a very detailed and full book for stories of how humans have raced in different capacities against each other, for progress, and to oppose disease as well as much more! It covers a diverse set of people and accomplishments and each page is packed with great information.

A reasonable success, this book doesn't quite reveal the kind of volume it intends to be right away. In starting with running – all Usain Bolt, the Olympics and so on – and then getting on to cars, skiing, cycling and other pacey pursuits, it might appear to be a junior world record book. But if you look closely, you can see the real purpose of it all. The running section features notice of prehistoric man's footprints, we're told skis existed five thousand years before the wheel, we get the origins of track and field throwing events, and are informed ancient ice skates were an animal bone strapped to the foot. This, then, is intended to show humanity's endeavours, how we've got quicker, more adept, more technological, more this that and the other as a species, and how there is always a historical origin for any aspect of our lives today.

So there is still a bit of the Guinness Book about things when we look at the race to the South Pole, and the much under-discussed opening up of Australia, but also not, when we see the development of the modern boat, and a bit of both when we cap the train history with the world's fastest, maglev, passenger locomotives. Through the full-colour proceedings we get little snippets of text, always alerting us to the first this, or the fastest that, or the most superlative other, so there's a lot to learn here. However I'm not sure if it will hit the heights it might deserve – it both seems too daft in trying to turn everything into a 'race', and yet also slightly dry at times. The visuals are of the rather staid kind, and while I appreciate those, the young reader might want something a bit more funky. So I finally got to see the reasoning behind these pages, and I saw quite a bit of merit to them too, but I don't know how successful this will ultimately be. Three and a half stars, then.