Rating: 2 out of 5
Of the two Tim Marshall books I’ve read, this was the better one. That’s not to say that this was good, just better. There still existed factual inaccuracies as well as a certain bias against some lands and places. Further, and to get my real bone with this volume, the book was a collection of facts and not a collection of stories.
What I can give the author some credit for is the relatively even distribution of countries that are covered. At the same time, this coverage gave me the feeling that the author didn’t have the courage to make a call on choosing, say, Bolivia over Ecuador to write a proper story and hence mentioned both of these as including colours X, Y and Z, and isn’t that just wonderful?
There is a certain theme to Mr Tim Marshall’s writings from what I can see — fairly shallow and not uninteresting. However, the way the facts are presented creates a second Wikipedia — while what a reader should want is a coherent narrative created by numerous intertwining stories.
