History with Flavor

By Sora Song

Joy Hakim's new science textbook is meant for kids, but even a well-read adult might learn a thing or two--for instance, that Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras was a fashion trailblazer who insisted on wearing trousers, then considered an Eastern style, while his countrymen were still in robes. Such are the details that pepper the narrative of Hakim's The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way (Smithsonian Books; 282 pages). Hakim's chatty style and character-driven stories have won her legions of fans. At age 11, Ethan Denny in Athens, Ga., wrote her to say she made him "feel that you are sitting next to me reading the books aloud." To date, Hakim's books have sold more than 4 million copies. According to Oxford University Press, which published her 10-volume American-history series, A History of US, her texts are used in thousands of classrooms in nearly every state. She has been called the J.K. Rowling of textbooks.

Hakim, 73, had never written for children before 1986, when she decided to try her hand at textbooks. Inspired by a University of Minnesota study that claimed kids retained 40% more information from passages written by journalists than by academics, Hakim, a former editor at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and a onetime teacher, began working on A History of US. The series was everything that conventional textbooks were not. Her books were not written by a committee, are structured around characters and stories rather than facts and dates and were kid-approved before publication. Hakim paid local children to edit her manuscripts by marking passages B for boring, G for good and NC for not clear.

While such historians as James McPherson and David McCullough have praised her work, critics say Hakim, who is neither a historian nor a scientist, can be too politically correct and sometimes inaccurate. A school in Florida took A History of US out of its classrooms in 2002 after a parent complained that the passages on the Vietnam war were too liberal. "I try very, very hard to be fair," says Hakim, "and I feel a responsibility not to present my bias." But, she says, opposing viewpoints and complex ideas belong in books for middle-schoolers. "Their minds are much more flexible than adults'," she says. Hakim, who now lives in a Denver suburb, is writing the third book in her science series, in which she will introduce Einstein and the principles of quantum physics. --By Sora Song