Benjamin Grant

CLEAR (Children’s Lit Evaluation And Review)

Title: Overview
Author: Benjamin Grant with Sandra Markle
Illustrator:
Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers
Copyright: 2019
Hardback X Paperback Board Book Number of Pages
Fiction X Nonfiction
Age/Grade: 1st through 5th grade
Format: Photo Essay
Illustration Type: Photographs
Illustration Rating: Outstanding
Genres: Realistic
Literary Merit: Excellant
Characterization: Excellant
Evaluation: Highly Recommend
Worch Memorial Library Reviewer: Patty Simon Date:
Review: Loved the photographs in the book. The descriptions of the pictures are easy to understand and follow. Love the before and after pictures that show how much climate change is harming our planet.… (meer)

Documenting the Anthropocene

The Earth suffers greatly under our stewardship. Benjamin Grant collects and reposts satellite images from around the world documenting it. These publicly available images are starkly beautiful and ultra-high quality, but looking at them in series is most uncomfortable. They depict evidence of Man: the discolored water, the scarred earth, the intense clusters of humanity, broken every so often by a spot of greenery.

Many of the shots are magnificent, poster-worthy and suitable for framing. Two that stand out for me are the solar array tromp oeil that appears to be a giant sphere, the ugly abscess of an open pit mine in Botswana and a section of Mexico City (See Amazon review for images). From the ugly ports to the massively complex airports to the checkerboard housing developments and agricultural fields – evidence of Man is everywhere, and it is never an improvement. There are some interesting before and afters – Burning Man during and after, a refugee camp where there just desert before, and polluted lakes in various states of distress. Either to prove the point or to relieve readers of angst, the last chapter, just a few shots, are of places untouched by Man.

Overview is a print best-of the same service on the internet, where Grant calls it dailyoverview. It is evidence for some future civilization as to what went wrong.

David Wineberg… (meer)