Booklist Review

Reviewed with JoAnn Milivojevic's Bosnia and Herzegovina0 . Gr. 4-6. Finely attuned to any number of conventional "country" assignment, these entries in the second Enchantment of the World series offer lucid commentary, digestible quantities of facts and statistics, eye-catching color photos, and eminently useful back matter. Both are similarly structured, with topical chapters presented in the same order, sandwiched between a tantalizing overview, and upbeat but not idealized closing insights into patterns of daily life in their respective lands. Thoughtful readers will be struck by the contrast between the authors' sometimes hard-hitting accounts of the devastating wars that have swept through each country and the brighter impressions conveyed in the photos (even scenes of land-mine removal in Bosnia and Herzegovina0 and unsmiling but well-kept refugees walking through verdant Congo landscapes have, at first glance, an idyllic air), but for collections that still own books with the words Yugoslavia 0 or Zaire0 in their titles, these make essential, first-choice replacements. --John Peters Copyright 2004 Booklist