This book is intended to encourage a friendly attitude towards people of other lands. Fast steamers, airplanes, and the radio have made the people of all lands neighbors, and American boys and girls must become better acquainted with their neighbors across the seas if they are to understand and appreciate them. Through material such as is given in Near the Top of the World, children may come to know interesting and likable people of another country, and to regard them as people like themselves, not as queer or amusing.

The author traveled widely in Scandinavia for the purpose of gathering material. She watched the people, especially the children, at work and play. She visited homes, schools, libraries, farms, saeters, Lapp settlements. She talked with teachers, librarians, and other citizens of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and they assisted her generously in seeing and interpreting life in their lands.

The pictures which illustrate the stories are photographs, some of them taken by the author. For other pictures she is grateful to the American-Swedish News Exchange, New York, the Norwegian Government Railway, New York, and the Danish Government Railway, New York.

The vocabulary is simple and although the book was written for no specific grade, the sentence structure has been adapted to third grade reading. The stories were tested in third grade classrooms and revised to remove any difficulties that were encountered. The vocabulary was checked with the Gates Word List and the Thorndike Word List with the following results: 74 per cent of the words in the random sampling fall in the Gates 1500 list; 84 per cent in Thorndike’s first 2000 list, 90 per cent in Thorndike’s first 3000 list, and 94 per cent in Thorndike’s first 5000 list. Very few unusual words have been used.

The material has numerous possibilities for classroom use:

The book will be of special service to teachers seeking material for units of study on other lands for social science classes. Curriculum makers for elementary schools have set up such units to break away from the more formal units of geography and history, but have found their attempts to be only partially successful because of the dearth of suitable reading material to put into the hands of the pupils.

Schools having separate courses in geography will find Near the Top of the World a valuable supplementary reader. From the story Greeting a Strange Sun to the story Planting of the Flag of Norway at the Bottom of the Earth, there are experiences to help children interpret how people make their ways of living fit the land in which they live.

In the folklore, the Viking tales, the descriptions of castles and open-air museums, the readers of Near the Top of the World see history as the background for the present-day life of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

Boys and girls, always interested in children of other lands, will find the book one to read just for fun. It will be especially liked by the children in America who are of Scandinavian origin or who have relatives in the Scandinavian countries.

In whatever way the book is used, the readers cannot fail to make interesting discoveries about the Scandinavian countries that have so generously contributed to American citizenship.