By Colorado Kids Advisory Board member Erik Brockbank

Title: Bury the Dead
Authors: Christopher Sloan, introduction by Bruno Frohlich
Publisher: National Geographic
Number of Pages: 64

If you enjoy writing and pictures about eerie mummies, creepy tombs, and scary death rituals, Christopher Sloan's Bury the Dead is definitely the next book for you to read.

Bury the Dead is an entirely non-fiction book filled with cool facts about ancient tombs, corpses, mummies, skeletons, and death rituals. The book begins with an introduction by Bruno Frohlich, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution who specializes in burial practices. The first two chapters are dedicated to burials in general and why people bury their dead. The rest of the book is filled with information about the very well known Egyptian mummies and Chinese clay soldiers, as well as the less popular Moche lords and Amazon people.

Though I know very little about Bruno Frohlich, I am quite familiar with Christopher Sloan, the author of Bury the Dead. As a reporter, I had the chance to interview him about Supercroc, a previous book of his, which was serialized in Colorado Kids. Chris is the Senior Editor at National Geographic magazine. He is an awesome writer and he did this book very well.

I would recommend this book to age six and up. Although it would be an easy read for anyone who is older than seven, there are certain parts that all ages can learn from. However, more importantly than anything else in this case are your interests. It doesn't really matter what reading level you're at if you tend to be totally grossed out by illustrations of thousand year old mummies in slime covered tombs.

My favorite part of the book is the chapter on the clay soldiers who were made for the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang Di. Some things I liked about the book were the variety of cultures Chris covered, and all the neat pictures he included. One thing that I like about Bury the Dead is that there are very few books out there that I know of on the same subject. I didn't like that the book was so short. At the end of it I felt like he kind of left me hanging. It gave me this feeling of, "Wait a minute, is that all?"

Overall, I would definitely recommend this book for it's great writing and wide variety of burial information (December, 2002)