Customer Reviews

Once I Was a Cardboard Box...But Now I'm a Book About Polar Bears

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I picked this book up at our school book fair and was very amazed. The cover is a sturdy thick cardboard, and can't be bent by little hands. I wasn't sure if I would like the book, but once I looked through the inside I was sold. I had to get it for my classroom. The book is a non-fiction account of polar bears. Included is the story of how the original cardboard boxes became the book. Very nice pictures and illustrations.

I applaud the concept of creating a book and including information about how that very book was made using recycled materials. Tony Potter (A.K.A. Anton Poitier) seems to have intended to publish a series of "Once I Was a Cardboard Box, But Now I'm a Book About..." books, but perhaps someone alerted him to the irony of writing a book about how Polar Bears are suffering the effects of global warming while also including a story in the sidebar about how the book's materials were shipped multiple times around the world. As the reader learns about Polar Bears, he simultaneously learns about how a cardboard box was made in China, shipped to the USA, shipped around the USA in a "big truck," turned into paper, shipped BACK to China, shipped around China in another truck, and finally turned into a book about Polar Bears that has obviously made its way from China back to the USA (or whatever country in which the reader resides). This cute book offers a terrific, albeit unintended, lesson about global warming and carbon footprints.