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Material World
At over 75,000 copies sold it's one of the most successful titles Sierra Club Books has
ever produced. It's been serialized in half a dozen magazines, made into a CD-ROM,
translated into three languages, used in classrooms and has been a mainstay of several
best-seller lists since its 1994 release. A two-year project financed in part by the
United Nations' World Population Fund, Material World
is the vivid result of photojournalist Peter Menzel's work to coordinate 16 of the world's
foremost shutterbugs in a pan-continental chronicle of peoples and their goods. The
photographers traveled to 30 countries to spend a week living with and documenting the
lives and effects of "statistically average" families. But their wide-angled
approach to each -- culminating in a final family portrait outside the home surrounded by
all their possessions -- achieves less-than-typical results. As an international
photographic documentary, Material World offers a privileged glimpse into a range of
lives. From Vietnam to Haiti, Italy to Houston, be it oxen and motorscooters or toilets
and TV, this book showcases the common humanity of the Earth's peoples and the tremendous
differences in their material wealth in a poignant and thought-provoking portrait of our
species -- eliciting the ultimate questions: Can all 5 billion of us have everything we
want? And what will happen to the Earth if we do?
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