These "educational" books for young people are too often a triumph of form over content - of packaging and marketing, the brightest covers and best positions in the bookshops come December, over really useful and usable information. Dorling Kindersley has often been the worst offender. Isn't it the bookish equivalent of Dreamcast hype to stick an atlas in a huge box, throw in a poster and CD-ROM, add the dreaded `M' word and charge £75 (in the UK) for the lot? Well, maybe. But the DK Millennium World Atlas is beautiful, with stunning satellite images, sensible categories, highly legible maps, etc. It's built to last, too - on the strongest shelf in the house.
If anything, the DK Atlas of World History (£29.99 in UK) is more ambitious, and a little too dazzling, with maps showing everything from the spread of Buddhism in the fifth to 12th centuries to the spread of Latinos in south Los Angeles over the last four decades. It's very grown-up stuff - preteen geographers, and your budget, might prefer the relatively tiny Collins Atlas of Exploration (£4.99 in the UK), more quibbleable historically but more readable too.
Kids with a love of the ancient past and who will brook no condescension might appreciate two from British Museum Press: The Mystery of the Hieroglyphs by Carol Donoughue (£8.99 in the UK) literally teaches hieroglyphics by reconstructing the process by which the Rosetta Stone was deciphered; Bright-Eyed Athena in the Stories of Ancient Greece by Richard Woff (£6.99 in UK) is for those who don't mind Titans and gorgons at bedtime. The publisher most adept at dressing mutton for this year's catwalk must be Kingfisher. Its large-format hardcovers on disasters, religions, the future, etc look good and are competitively priced from £9.99, but they're not necessarily meant for close grown-up scrutiny. The Kingfisher Book of Planet Earth by Martin Redfern (£14.99 in UK) looked okay to me - apart from a questionable summary of human evolution - but I'm no geologist. Just an hour or two with the Kingfisher History Encyclopaedia (£30) in the UK), however, revealed several typos, small errors in the index and at least one very substantial mistake about the politics of post-civil war reconstruction in the US. Its organisation is hopelessly inpenetrable: turn the page from "Year of Revolution 1848" and you have "New Zealand 1792-1907", immediately followed by "The Crimean War 1853-1856".
Unlike the DK books, which struggle conspicuously for a global perspective, this one has a strong European and anglophone bias: while India rates 30 lines in the index, Indonesia doesn't appear there at all. (It does feature, passingly, in the text.) Other odd priorities include the reduction of the Holocaust to a single paragraph, with no illustration. As for Ireland, "David (sic) O'Connell (1775-1847) was a fighter for the rights of Catholic people in Britain." Later, Michael Collins "became leader of Sinn Fein", then civil war broke out in 1919.
The untouchables in this collection, the books my young kids wouldn't dream of allowing me to give away for Christmas, are two from Walker. Each tells complex stories via simple narratives; each opens up attractive areas of history. Castle Diary (£14.99 in UK) by Richard Platt (illustrated wittily by Chris Riddell) probes life in England circa 1285, and by extension the contours of feudal society, via the fictional first-person narrative of a young page on a country estate. It comes complete with nicely turned tales of violence and boredom at the joust, of justice and injustice for poachers and, of course, ample "ewwww gross" explications of medieval sewage facilities.
The History News: Revolution (£10.99 in the UK) by Christopher Maynard is another volume in the excellent Walker series that has included The Greek News, The Roman News, The Stone Age News, etc etc. Wrapped in a cheeky graphic that blends the hammer-and-sickle with the French tricolour and the Stars and Stripes, this tells the tales of several uprisings in the form of pretend newspaper articles and interviews ("How long have you been in exile, Mr Lenin?"), pitched nicely for pre-teens and young teenagers. (I love the bit where a jittery Louis XVI, cornered for a chat in his prison cell, shouts "Don't call me Sire!" at the History News reporter.)
The Small Book of Big Questions (Puffin, £3.99 in the UK) by Jackie French is the cheapest but not the shoddiest volume in this stack. The Australian author takes on "childish" questions on everything from evolution to UFOs, from the reasons for racism to life after death. It's both scientifically sound and suitably respectful of the separate realms of religion and metaphysics. No, it won't shut up your curious and precocious brat, but you wouldn't want that anyway, would you?
Harry Brown is an Irish Times journalist