Customer Reviews

Celebrate Connections among Cultures

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Through photographs and well-designed text placement, Jan Reynolds demonstrates the common ways we celebrate. We gather together, we eat and drink, we play music, we dance, we use fire!

Children will recognize themselves dressed-up in Halloween costumes then admire the Inuit boy in a real wolf skin and the Sami girl in beautiful reindeer hide shoes. They will appreciate a view of a familiar birthday cake decorated with candles and then, connect the use of fire to burn a ceremonial mandala painting in a Tibetan celebration.

Reynolds examines Tibetans and Sherpas from the Himalaya, Aborigines in Australia, the Yanomami from the Amazon rain forest, the Balinese, the Tuareg of the Sahara, the Sami who live above the Artic Circle, and the Inuit! A well-designed map helps place these cultures on the globe. Her photographs are rich with color and life.

I usually do not like books that scream, "Buy me because I am multicultural!" as so often, they are preachy-teachy. Celebrate is just a terrific book and it rejoices in how similar the people of this planet are.

Celebrate!: Connections Among Cultures by Jan Reynolds is a superbly illustrated descriptive survey of diverse cultures around the world, and the similarities many of them share. Carrying young readers ages 5 to 9 through an outstanding collection of photographs combined with a "kid friendly" text, Celebrate! offers an intriguing look into the celebrations of such different people and cultures as those of the Australian Outback, Bali, the Amazon basin of South America, the tropical islands of Indonesia in South Asia, and so many more. An important contribution to school and community library "Other Lands, Other People" reference collections for children, Celebrate! is very strongly recommended for anthropological compendium of facts for elementary school level social studies and world culture curriculum supplemental reading lists.