Eastern Europe

School Library Journal

Gr 5-8In each volume, 11 geographical topics such as the landscape, daily life, natural resources, and transportation are treated in 2-to-4 pages of text. Excellent, full-color photographs, maps, many blocks of key facts, and graphs are used to convey additional information. Eastern Europe is the weaker of the two titles. While it is noted that the geographical center of Europe is in Slovakia, no explanation is given for the term Eastern Europe, which was used during the cold war as a political label for all of the Warsaw Pact countries, not just the six included in this volume. Today, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary usually consider themselves as part of Central Europe. At times the text seems to get bogged down in too many details or figures. Russia is more cohesive and better written, although a few errors or misleading statements creep in, such as a reference to football as a popular sport when it should be soccer, or a graph showing Russia with a very low number of pupils per teacher when in fact classes are usually larger than in some of the other countries cited. For more in-depth material and attention to history and culture, students can turn to books on individual countries. The strengths of these two volumes lie in their emphasis on geography and their attractive format for quick overviews.Elizabeth Talbot, University of Illinois, Champaign