Review: This Is the World: A Global Treasury

This Is the World: A Global Treasury by Miroslav Sasek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

22 August 2021

Read yet again for my 365 Kids Book challenge. You can see all the books on their own shelf. Even as I am trying to catch up on my backlog of reviews in order to clear the TBR shelves for monsters, murder, and suchlike for the two months of All Hallow's Read and Halloween Bingo, I walked out of my libraries yesterday with more books than I could carry into the house in one trip.

Despite the objections I have to it, I do keep coming back. And when I do I usually end up wandering off on a side trip through maps or wikipedia. Today I went down the rabbit hole of biofluorescence because of the platypus. It's funny: I notice that Australia has a lot of that trademark box city from above portraits and a lot of animals and hardly any culture at all.

Now I'm really curious about what got left out of all of them.

***

14 November 2017

Culture: You're soaking in it. What's wrong with this sentence:

Platypus looks as if he were forever unable to decide what he wants to be: he has a beak like a bird, he swims under water like a fish, he has fur like a kangaroo, and he lays eggs but suckles his young.

***

18 March 2016

When I was a child we had a copy of This is London. In the London book there is a picture of a man, in a park, up a tree, and he's sawing off a tree branch: the one that he's sitting on! How quaint that seems now. I'd love to have all the original books, or reprints of same, in theory. I'm worried that the judicious choice of snippets for this book might have some possible basis in the idea of excising images or text that would be broadly offensive now. There is an emphasis here on Anglophone interests, and nothing, I think, on the native people of any location [Actually, there is a reference to Australian Aborigines, who mostly live in cities, "in more remote areas others still live as they may have done in traditional times, with their legends, their dances, their wood carvings and their bark painting." Based on that example, it's probably better not to include anything he might have said about indigenous people anywhere]. Really, it can't deserve the word "world" without anything from South America, Africa, or Asia, excepting Hong Kong which was still British at the time.

Anyway, I loved it. The art is so sixties, and so cool, even now it remains distinctive and attractive. His cities of tiny boxes are still cool. It may be a safe nostalgia, but it was good.

Library copy

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