What Makes Us Human is a stunning piece of illustrated poetry that uses a very small number of words to make a great impact. The illustrations are beautiful, depicting humans from different cultures, who, nevertheless, so clearly belong together. I wish this book was ten times longer.

Connected to UNESCO, this is a tribute to what makes us human, which in this reckoning is language. We never go through life without at least one, but more is preferable, and we have to take note of the many that are dying out, especially when you consider how few inventions we as a species would have made without having that one first. This is an easily read, and pretty, picture book, but perhaps something too worthy to really be entertaining – it doesn't drum its message in, but it isn't exactly the ball of fun some young readers would need.

This was an interesting take on “what makes us human” but it wasn’t overtly obvious for me that the answer was “language.” As usual the art work knocked it out of the park and I think overall it had a good message but for me it was a little short.

I went into reading this book rather blind and didn't at first realize that the "I" in the book was referring to language. I liked that it kept you guessing throughout, while giving you small clues to understand who/what this "I" was.
Lovely illustrations that are pleasent to look at, tucks at the heartstrings and makes you think.
The main reason I am not giving it 5 stars is because it felt kind of empty. There was no storytelling to the book. There was just this guessing game of who the I was and it felt a bit too much lilke a promotion for the UN declaring the 2020's the international decade of indegenious languages. If the book had contained more storytelling elements, I'd probably bumpt it up to 4.5/5 stars

What Makes Us Human is a beautifully illustrated children's book which is essentially a riddle. I think children would appreciate the illustrations and the guessing game, and I imagine linguists will appreciate the importance of language in creating and sustaining human community and our humanity. This would make a great gift and I hope libraries will purchase this.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

I requested this children's book from NetGalley (thanks for the e-Arc!) because it was released with UNSECO and I thought it was about languages. In fact it's a poetic riddle that has us turning pages to find out what connects all humans. It raises interesting questions and challenges that humanity is facing right now - for example it mentions the predicted extinction of half of all human languages by 2100. This is well within the lifetime of children who might be reading, or having this book read to them now. This is a fairly distressing fact. It's also a children's book, so not a whole lot of scope for explaining genocide, centralisation, cultural imperialism, mass migration through climate necessity and so on. On a smaller level, I felt there needed to be a "what can you do" in order to empower children to assist, rather than just leave the problem sitting there. I didn't read this to a child, I suspect a child would look at the well drawn and interesting pictures, enjoy the text and move on.

I love this book so much. It is clever and informs readers about the role of language in culture. This engaging book will make children think, learn, and hopefully appreciate other languages.

Thank you NetGalley and Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company for this advanced copy. All opinions are my own.

3 1/2 stars

This is a beautiful story about language and how it connects everything and anything. It's a wonderful poem that would get children to think about how if nothing else all humans communicate and how we communicate.

The blurb at the end about how many languages are active/dead and the reminder that not all language is written and spoken was a nice touch.

This book is gorgeous and important! There are over 7,000 living languages, and experts are predicting that we're going to lose many of them in the not so distant future. When those languages are gone, that might be the last of those cultures.
You can see so many different kinds of people in this little picture book. Language is so important to humans but we don't think about it. I recommend this for everyone, adults and children.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this