Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
A Moment in Time: A Perpetual Picture Atlas
Novelty Nonfiction Book
For ages 7 and up
360 Degrees, 2017 ISBN: 978-1944530075
Imagine that it is midday where you live and you are about to have your lunch. At this moment in time someone in France is having their dinner at eight o’clock in the evening. While you are having your lunch at midday, someone in Alaska is just getting out of bed at eight in the morning, and someone in Moscow is preparing to go to bed at nine o’clock at night. How curious it is that people all over the world are all doing such very different things at this very moment.
In this wonderful book we are taken around the world to see “what every part of the world is doing at exactly the same moment, every hour of the day.” Pictures are presented without descriptions – the only words that appear are the names of the places we are visiting. Moving from picture to picture, we travel to every continent, and explore the world “through the medium in time.”
You can jump into this book at any point, but let’s start on the first spread. Here we are shown a world map and we see the locations of all the places that are shown in the artwork that follows. We see the time zones that we are going to encounter, and are giving information about how we might use the book.
Then our journey begins. We are on Baker Island in the Pacific and it is six in the morning. Curlews are up and about, walking and flying in the pink light of an early dawn. On a beach on nearby Howland Island a crab scuttles across a beach.
Two pages on and it is eight o’clock in the morning. Children are walking to school in Honolulu on the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian archipelago.
Four times zones ahead and we are able to watch a lady grind corn in Honduras, and see a street artist working on a mural.
Many thousands of miles away, in Japan, it is three in the morning. In Toyko people are still up and about enjoying the vibrant night life of the city.
When we get to the end of the pectoral narrative we are presented with further information about the places that we have visited.
This is the kind of book that readers of all ages will find engaging and interesting. The artwork is beautiful, and as we go from place to place, back and forth through time, we come to appreciate how beautiful and diverse our planet is.
