At first glance, this looks like an ABC book, but the alphabet plays a distant second to a combination gazetteer and cultural geography. Each of 26 countries is covered in a spread that includes a greeting in the appropriate language, a map, and several full-color photographs of children in typical settings and situations; the result is an encounter with the local dress, transportation, and architecture, as well as a glimpse of the work and play of children. Ajmera and Versola offer a gold mine of interesting national nuggets--that Zimbabwe means ``stone houses,'' that girls and women in Yemen decorate their hands with swirls of henna, that Budapest is really two cities, Buda and Pest, split by the Danube--and include concise regional and ethnic histories, with X standing for the ``imaginary'' country of Xanadu. A short fact sheet for every country relays one particularly fascinating item: the proportion of children to the population as a whole, giving readers instant understanding of population pyramids, e.g., Russia has 34 million children out of an overall population of 147 million, while Oman has 1 million children in a population of 2 million. A pleasing and hopeful book--sugar-coated as it may be--with a feel-good global outlook. (Nonfiction. 7-9)
