Three years ago I read the bestseller Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics and this is the junior edition: Prisoners of Geography: Our World Explained in 12 Simple Maps, illustrated young readers edition by Tim Marshall; illustrated by Grace Easton and Jessica Smith. It is an oversize hardcover of eighty pages filled with maps, all of which were overlaid with text bubbles as can be seen on the front cover. I ordinarily do not feature cover images so large but it would be pointless if I reduced the cover size such that the text within the bubbles was illegible.
Marshall covered twelve regions of the world and expanded within them. He kept the same order as in the earlier version, starting with Russia, then mainland China, the USA, Canada, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, Latin America, Australia and ending with the Arctic. The “adult” version dealt with only ten regions, leaving out Canada and Australia, and as I reread my review for that book I realized that Marshall covered exactly the same topics in the junior edition, so there’s no need to repeat everything here. The author did not talk down to the junior reader and dealt with sensitive topics such as slavery, religious divisions within the Middle East and the foundation of Israel. What makes this book a truly junior edition are the illustrative and colourful maps. Easton and Smith also provided small and meticulously detailed drawings to supplement them. I could appreciate the tiny sizes of, for example, the many peoples of Iraq, but I found the tiny inset maps hard to read, especially with their cursive text. Colour contrast would have helped me with the tiny Mississippi Basin map, where all the US states were presented in varying shades of blue but with a black cursive overlay.