Peter the Great

Peter the Great, crowned tsar of Russia at the age of ten, believed that whatever he wanted he should have — and the sooner the better. What he wanted most was to bring his beloved country into the modem world. He traveled to the West to learn European ways — the first tsar ever to leave Russia — disguised as a common soldier.

He explored the West with excitement and curiosity and returned home ready to undertake a series of momentous social reforms. And to satisfy his boyhood dream of a Russian naval port, he began to build, on a freezing swamp, a glittering new capital to be named St. Petersburg.

In this welcome reissue of Diane Stanley's acclaimed picturebook biography, her meticulously researched text and sumptuous illustrations capture the fabulous world of seventeenth — and eighteenth-century tsarist Russia and the greatness of its larger-than-life leader — a man of huge stature and tremendous spirit whose impatience and vision, insatiable curiosity and boundless energy transformed half a continent.

A biography of the tsar who began the transformation of Russia into a modern state in the late seventeenth-early eighteenth centuries.

Peter the Great, crowned tsar of Russia at the age of ten, believed that whatever he wanted he should have — and the sooner the better. What he wanted most was to bring his beloved country into the modem world. He traveled to the West to learn European ways — the first tsar ever to leave Russia — disguised as a common soldier.

He explored the West with excitement and curiosity and returned home ready to undertake a series of momentous social reforms. And to satisfy his boyhood dream of a Russian naval port, he began to build, on a freezing swamp, a glittering new capital to be named St. Petersburg.

In this welcome reissue of Diane Stanley's acclaimed picturebook biography, her meticulously researched text and sumptuous illustrations capture the fabulous world of seventeenth — and eighteenth-century tsarist Russia and the greatness of its larger-than-life leader — a man of huge stature and tremendous spirit whose impatience and vision, insatiable curiosity and boundless energy transformed half a continent.

Diane Stanley is the author and illustrator of many award-winning books for young readers. Her novels include the critically acclaimed Bella at Midnight, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and an ALA Booklist Editors' Choice, The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy, The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine, and A Time Apart. Well known as the author and illustrator of award-winning picture-book biographies, she is the recipient of the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children and the Washington Post-Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award for the body of her work.

Ms. Stanley has also written and illustrated numerous picture books, including three creatively imagined fairy tales:The Giant and the Beanstalk, Goldie and the Three Bears, and Rumpelstiltskin's Saughter. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.