Grade 3-5-- At first glance, these offerings look spectacular, with superb, unusual, well-chosen color photos that make one positively salivate for the text. Closer inspection, however, destroys first impressions. The overuse of exclamation points to pepper the text leaves one with a bad taste of condescension. Photo captions are often confusingly placed, sometimes nowhere near the pictures they detail. Some captions do not describe their photos adequately. For example, in . . . People there is a photo of a Japanese family dining; the caption reads (in part) ". . . the sliding doors that look like windows are called shoji. The other doors with the mountain designs are called fusuma." The trouble is, those latter doors are simply not there. In . . .
