awesome book about material possessions

[mamatosage]

Hi,

I got so excited by this book that I wanted to share with you.
It's called:
Material World: A Global Family Portrait
by Peter Menzel

Here is the blurb provided:

In honor of the United Nations-sponsored International Year of the Family in 1994, award-winning photojournalist Peter Menzel brought together 16 of the world's leading photographers to create a visual portrait of life in 30 nations. Material World tackles its wide subject by zooming in, allowing one household to represent an entire nation. Photographers spent one week living with a "statistically average" family in each country, learning about their work, their attitudes toward their possessions, and their hopes for the future. Then a "big picture" shot of the family was taken outside the dwelling, surrounded by all their (many or few) material goods.
The book provides sidebars offering statistics and a brief history for each country, as well as personal notes from the photographers about their experiences. But it is the "big pictures" that tell most of the story. In one, a British family pauses before a meal of tea and crumpets under a cloudy sky. In another, wary Bosnians sit beside mattresses used as sniper barricades. A Malian family composed of a husband, his two wives, and their children rests before a few cooking and washing implements in golden afternoon light. Material World is a lesson in economics and geography, reminding us of the world's inequities, but also of humanity's common threads. An engrossing, enlightening book. --Maria Dolan

I'm so excited to read it--I've ordered it.

[lauriemama]

Sounds good!

I read an article in the newspaper on Sunday that I wanted to post in its entirety without hand typing, but I couldn't get it online without paying for it. I'll post a little though. The article is mainly about how busy families are when both parents work. But it also touches on the issue of too much stuff. They were studying families and compiling information:

"Archaeologist Jeanne Arnold planned to treat each house in the study like a dig site, cataloging and mapping family belongings as artifacts. but there was too much stuff. Instead, her staff took photographs. Thousands of them.

"By her rough estimate, the typical American family owns more than most Egyptian pharaohs.

"The world has never seen consumption on this scale, Arnold says. 'And every week we see more stuff arriving. People can't stop.'"