China (Letters from Around the World) - Softcover

Julia Waterlow has travelled and photographed much of China and has written many information books for children.

Kindergarten-Grade 3-These titles have two-page entries on basic geography and cultural topics such as food, work, home, and school. The print is large and most pages have no more than two sentences of text. The color photographs are appealing, although the angles used to present them as snapshots make their captions more difficult for beginning readers to decipher. However, some egregious errors occur in all three books. Both China and Russia include the statement that people have lived there for over 500,000 years. Similarly, it is ludicrous to state that in some Chinese villages "people have lived in the same way for thousands of years." A caption for the Temple of Heaven states that people go there to pray for a good harvest, when in fact, people never prayed there; only the Emperor in imperial times did so occasionally. Prague is on the Vltava river, not the Moldau, and the currency is the koruna or crown, not the krone. In Russia, metric conversions are incorrect (2200 feet do not equal 2195 meters). There are also very misleading statements, as when Tatar, Ukrainian, and Russian are given as the "three main languages" in Russia without any indication of the primacy of Russian or that a small percentage of the people speak Tatar or Ukrainian. Children deserve more accurate texts.
Elizabeth Talbot, University of Illinois, Champaign
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