Southern Africa

School Library Journal

Gr 6-9-Southern Africa looks at the nations of Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. Beginning with chapters on landscapes, climate, and resources, the book moves on to discuss population, daily life, politics, farming, industry, transportation, and the environment. A final page speaks of the future. Middleton emphasizes the area's commonalities, such as a shared colonial past and water problems, yet stresses the countries' immense diversity. This makes for a fact-packed book, and students may not always be able to sort out what is important. Explanations are generally clear, but such broad coverage can lead to fragmentation. ``The war'' (in Mozambique) is referred to on three different pages before there is even the briefest explanation of it, with the fact that it lasted almost 30 years appearing only at the fifth separate mention. Apartheid is explained without any discussion of its commonalities with race relations in Namibia and Zimbabwe. The full-color photographs balance rural and urban images. They are attractive and usually support the text, although a picture of Crossroads (near Cape Town) captioned ``living conditions are poor and overcrowded...'' appears to have been taken during the ``removals'' in the early '80s. Charts and graphs add relevant detail, as do ``Key Facts'' boxes, though none of this visual material is accessible through the index. The human dimension is likely to come through to young people better in more narrowly focused books on individual nations, but the geographic emphasis and regional coverage here make this title a useful addition to many collections.-Loretta Kreider Andrews, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore