If the Earth...Were a Few Feet in Diameter - Hardcover

Miller, Joe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0867130547 ISBN 13: 9780867130546

Publisher: Greenwich Pr Ltd, 1998

Synopsis

Bold and imaginative color paintings and fun scientific facts complement a simple, incremental poem that celebrates the beauty, bounty, and wonder of Earth and conveys the love and respect humans ought to have for it. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Authors

Joe Miller lives with his wife Dana and their small daughter Noe Wren in a little house in a little woods on a small island upon a little planet. This poem was written in Moab, Utah, where Joe lives with his first wife and their five children, who are now all grown and blazing out in the larger world. Joe has been a painter for forty years, stead-fastly in love with the blue of the sky.

Wilson McLean was born in Scotland and moves to London when he was ten. He attended art school at night while working at several magazines which exposed him to the work of American illustrators. In 1966 he followed his dream and moved to New York where he gained a reputation for his unique illustration. His clients include the U.S. and Great Britain Postal Services, nearly every major national magazine, book publishers, airlines, Hollywood studios and blue chip corporations. He has won every major illustrator's award in the United States, including gold and silver medals from the New York Art Director's Show and four gold and eight silver medals at the New York Society of Illustrators Shows. He has taught at Syracuse University, School of Visual Arts and Kent State University. This is his first book.

Reviews

Grade 2-4-In 1975, Miller wrote a concrete poem shaped like Earth's globe. In it, he invited readers to view our planet from a startling perspective-as a few feet in diameter, hanging just above the surface of a grassy field. The sphere is complete with oceans, mountains, plains, deserts, and weather systems; decorated with miniature forests, jungles, and grasslands; and inhabited by the marvelous biodiversity that makes our planet unique in our solar system. People would come, he tells us, to view it with awe and delight, reveling in its fragile beauty and its infinite variety, cherishing and protecting it. It's a charming conceit that may be marred for some by an assertion that "...people would declare it as sacred...would come to pray to it, to be healed..." a rather New Age play on the Earth Goddess theme. McLean's colorful, dramatic, somewhat stylized paintings almost shadow Miller's slim text, and are filled with awe-struck humans, the majority Caucasian in origin. Also included are four sidebars on topics as diverse as the number of organisms in a tenth of an ounce of soil to a severely truncated creation myth from China. A striking book, but one with limited child appeal.
Patricia Manning, formerly at Eastchester Public Library, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Miller imagines the earth in miniatureAas a strange ball that hovers "above a field somewhere," inspiring awe from people of all different walks of life. Unfortunately, the hyperrealistic, almost scientific description is at odds with the religious response described in the text: "People would marvel at the bumps on it and the holes in it. They would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas." Sidebar facts appearing on alternating pages give readers more concrete reasons to gawk: the tallest plant, for example, is 300 million times the size of the smallest. But readers will likely be put off by the time they reach the over-the-top conclusion: "The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to pray to it, to be healed, to gain knowledge... " McLean's spreads of animals and sea creatures are breathtaking, and his rendering of the floating earth-ball bulging with oversized volcanoes resembles the Little Prince's planet. In this uneasy marriage of the scientific and the spiritual, the earth comes off as comical instead of grand, funky instead of sacred. Ages 4-8.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Greenwich Pr Ltd
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0867130547
• ISBN 13: 9780867130546
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: McLean Wilson
• Number of pages: 32