I remember when I was in my early 20’s I had preconceived ideas of how people looked when they were a certain age. When our children were younger we’d ask them how old they thought we were and how old they thought their grandparents are. How Old Am I?, Faces From Around The World is a fascinating book that asks basic questions and illustrates how people look from around the world.
When you open up the book readers are confronted with seven basic questions that are laid out on colorful speech bubbles placed on black paper. Where do you live? What is your wish for the world? What is your story to tell? All of the questions, except for that last one are basic ones that kids can think about and ask themselves.
As they read on they’ll meet people from all over the world who are aged one through 100. The one-year-old is a boy from the United Kingdom, the 100-year-old is a woman from the United States, the 63-year-old is a man from Bosnia, and so on. How Old Am I? is by JR and is part of The Inside Out Project. The basic premise behind that is that everyone has a story to tell. Each story is true, unique and something that should be heard. The Inside Out Project has done art projects around the world, including Malawi, Germany, El Salvador, and more.
All of the projects revolve around portraits, much like the ones in How Old Am I?. Does a 14-year-old boy from Norway look like me? You’ll read that they like their dog, skiing and that he wants to be a doctor when he grows up. The 52-year-old man from Trinidad grew up building background sets for school plays, but now he works in finance and lives in the USA. The 78-year-old man from Taiwan lives in Australia now and works as an architect where he runs his own company. He says that life is very different from when grew up.
Older readers will find it very easy to be glib about How Old Am I?. However, once they look in the book, they’ll also find it very easy to get lost in it. Also, keep in mind that this book is meant for children as a way to show people in one corner of the world, what people look like at different ages on the other side of the planet. They’ll see that people from all over the world think like them, had the same issues growing up that they did, have had deaths, successes, dramatic change, and happiness. Younger readers will have the same takeaways from the book and perhaps that’s the point of The Inside Out Project.
We’re all quite similar. The locations and appearances will change and be different, but from a hardwired, life experience perspective, we’re the same. Except for you, you’re utterly unique, special and one of kind, but you’re also very similar to the person who is the same age as you in Peru, El Salvador, or wherever the person lives who is the same age.
How Old Am I? is not the kind of book that will be in most home libraries. It’s a book that you’ll see in the library, look at it for a moment, and then get utterly sucked into it. Each person has a full-size photograph of their head on one page. On the other page is their age, name, world map (so you can visually see where they’re from), and a short paragraph about them. Most of the paragraphs are about the life lessons they’ve learned, things they wanted to do, things that they did, or positive messages to live by.
The book’s layout is calming and peaceful, which adds to the aspect of wanting to read about each age. How Old Am I? is a fascinating, interesting book that has the simple goal of showing people that we have more in common than our differences. The pages are printed in a graduated color scheme with each age decade gradually changing, much like the hair on our body. It’s a book that’s certainly worth looking over for one reason or another.
How Old Am I? is by JR, an Inside Out Project with words by Julie Pugeat, and available on Phaidon Press.
There are affiliate links in this post.
Facebook
Twitter
Flickr
GooglePlus
Youtube