A review by easyqueenie
The People Awards by Lily Murray
2.0
The People Awards by Lily Murray celebrates 29 men and women from across the world who have achieved something great. Each person is given an award—the Curiosity Award for Einstein, the Saving Lives Award to Louis Pasteur—and their bio introduces them very briefly along with the reasons why they have won their award. Each bio is illustrated with a portrait of the person, and their second page is designed to look like a collection of photographs showing them at important moments of their lives.
This was probably my least favorite of the bunch. I wasn’t taken with the art style and I felt that the lack of any particular focus such as women, Australians, musicians, etc meant that the book was rather haphazard and unfocused. The people were introduced at random instead of being in chronological or any other kind of order, and were simply too much of a mixed bag—why these particular people out of so many possible choices?
The Awards were often oddly specific too—J.K. Rowling won the Most Magical Muggle Award, Marie Curie the X-Ray award, and Pele the 1279 Goals Award. No one else is going to be eligible to “win” these, so they end up feeling less like an award and more an excuse to include them. I would have preferred to see a set of vaguer awards—scientific achievement, athletic achievement, etc—with a person chosen to win these from all those who would be eligible, although choosing a single person to win such prizes when your pool of potential winners isn’t narrowed down by the focus of the book and instead includes everybody who has ever lived presents its own challenge.
The book does do a good job of including people from a range of nationalities, although people of color are once again significantly outnumbered by whites. There were also some names included here that I haven’t seen in the other books, such as Olaudah Equiano, Vincent Lingiari, and Mary Anning, but these just couldn’t make up for the overly random nature of the book.
This was probably my least favorite of the bunch. I wasn’t taken with the art style and I felt that the lack of any particular focus such as women, Australians, musicians, etc meant that the book was rather haphazard and unfocused. The people were introduced at random instead of being in chronological or any other kind of order, and were simply too much of a mixed bag—why these particular people out of so many possible choices?
The Awards were often oddly specific too—J.K. Rowling won the Most Magical Muggle Award, Marie Curie the X-Ray award, and Pele the 1279 Goals Award. No one else is going to be eligible to “win” these, so they end up feeling less like an award and more an excuse to include them. I would have preferred to see a set of vaguer awards—scientific achievement, athletic achievement, etc—with a person chosen to win these from all those who would be eligible, although choosing a single person to win such prizes when your pool of potential winners isn’t narrowed down by the focus of the book and instead includes everybody who has ever lived presents its own challenge.
The book does do a good job of including people from a range of nationalities, although people of color are once again significantly outnumbered by whites. There were also some names included here that I haven’t seen in the other books, such as Olaudah Equiano, Vincent Lingiari, and Mary Anning, but these just couldn’t make up for the overly random nature of the book.