How the World Works

Christiane Dorion is a writer and educational consultant who has taught sustainable development for over 20 years. She coordinated the WWF UK Primary Education programme, and has written a number of children's books about the environment.Beverley Young (Illustrator) is a freelance Artist/Illustrator living and working in Cornwall. She studied at Falmouth School of Art, where she specialised in Ceramic Design, but later returned to painting.She works in acrylic on board, and also Photoshop, creating lively, quirky illustrations for children's books, magazines, advertising and packaging.

Although not as striking from a paper-engineering standpoint, the visual explanations in "How the Word Works" are nevertheless wide-ranging and impressive, covering what truly governs our days: sunlight, fresh water, winds and other key components, Writer Christiane Dorion and illutstrator Beverley Young start with the Big Bang (where else?) and end with the food chain that keeps us all going. In between are hands-on displays, such as a dial that reveals some of the thousands of objects that orbit around the earth., another dial that shows the history of the earth squeezed into 24 hours (always late to the party, humans show up 14 seconds before midnight), a flip book that follows Pangaea's dispersal into today's continents, and four pull-tabs that cleverly illustrate what happens when two continental plates come together or move apart. Double-page spreads about the weather, the movement of the sea and the carbon cycle make apparent the interconnectedness of the Earth's populations. Although the clear and informative text carries a pro-environment message, It stays clear of preachiness. The facts are what jump out at you.