Handbook of the Nations [antikvár]

IntroductionThis volume marks the culmination of a project that has taken almost six years to complete: the publication of a series of 34 books, totaling 5,600 pages, that comprise the Life World Library.The aim of this series has been to present a comprehensive interpretation, in text and photographs, of the principal nations and peoples of the contemporary world. We have thought of our typical reader as a person who welcomes an evocative summing up of all the facets of a nation's life so that he will have a deeper understanding of events and personalities in the news. He may not be planning a visit abroad but reading one of these volumes should help him, if he is fortunate enough to travel, to enjoy a better grasp of the contemporary scene wherever he goes.In order to achieve a measure of detachment toward often controversial matters, the editors from the outset adopted a policy of having the text chapters in each volume written by a person intimately acquainted with his subject but not native to thecountry or area he is writing about. Understandably, a majority of the authors have been Americans, but almost a third have been British; most have made refresher tripssometimes covering thousands of milesbefore sitting down to write. Each author has been supplemented by a staff of writers, researchers and designers in New York and by photographers and correspondents working out of Time-Life Bureaus around the world. The result is a collaborative work that has been translated into 13 languages and is now distributed in more than 90 countries.We have urged our authors to write in their own individual styles, and in this and other ways we have tried to bring variety to the series. But we hardly needed to stress the differences among nations, for they are endlessly diverse. Yet in preparing these volumes we have been struck over and over again by two truisms of world history so obvious that they are often little appreciated. One of these is that the luck of geography plays a large role in the story of