TRINIDAD/TOBAGO

Well-greased with cliche (""Oil flows through the financial veins of Trinidad and Tobago"") and packed with largely uninterpreted, unrelated data, this geography lecture is aimed straight at those teachers who consider any hardback source more acceptable than an encyclopedia article. Thus we learn how many Singer sewing machines are sold yearly but find out little about the overall impact of foreign investment or how the $900 average annual income translates into living conditions; the nearly even division between citizens of African and Indian descent--which lends the country ""a quality both of strength and diversity""--is dismissed with one paragraph of generalizations. Even the spirit of carnival gets diluted here in a wishy-washy explanation of calypsos (a few songs are named, none quoted) and a single, hard-to-decipher photo of those spectacular carnival costumes. Marshall was formerly the United States ambassador to the islands and is limited here as much by his sense of diplomatic discretion as by the restrictive format. A minimally useful fact book.