Book Review: If the World Were a Village

David J. Smith's idea (adeptly illustrated by Shelagh Armstrong) is a simple one, but it works beautifully: Imagine the world as one big village. You don't have countries. You don't have borders. You don't have wars over borders. You just have 100 people, and they all live in the same place. They all live together and work together, yet speak different languages and belong to different religions. The number one word here is togetherness.

Actually, it's closer to the point to say that this book is a metaphor for the world today. In this global village, we find 100 people. Of those 100 people, 61 are from Asia, 22 speak a Chinese dialect, 32 are Christians, 76 have electricity, and so on. For each part of life (nationality, religion, money, education, food and water) we are treated to a breakdown of how many people are in each category. The author even includes an age breakdown, to show that the majority of people in the village are between the ages of 10 and 49.