A review by liralen
Material World: A Global Family Portrait by Peter Menzel

4.0

This book is almost twenty years old, but I would expect the contrasts it illustrates to be just as stark today. (I'd actually love -- knowing that this is unrealistic -- to see the same project done today; it would be interesting to see where the greatest/fewest changes are.) The point is not exactly what each family has, but more how big the difference is between, say, the standard of living / statistical average of the family in Japan compared to the family in Mali compared to the family in India compared to the family in Kuwait. Given the amount of time that has elapsed since the book's publication, the numbers are not as useful as they once were, but at the same time in some ways very little seems to have changed.

I don't know if the photo quality or the printing was off -- something seems to have been -- but the book suffered slightly from an occasionally awkward layout of photos and text. That said, again, the value is really in the contrasts.