Look at the Details, Search for the Bigger Picture
By Istvan Banyai
From Publishers Weekly (1994) -
"This provocative wordless volume can be 'read' either from front to back or even from back to front. Either way, it's a startling experience. Its illustrations 'zoom' out, as though a viewer has rapidly backed away from each. For example, the first painting, of a jagged-edged red shape, turns out to be a detail of a rooster's comb; as the pages turn, the bird diminishes in importance, until the barn where he stands is shown to be a toy on a magazine's cover. That magazine dangles from the hand of a dozing boy, who himself becomes but a smudge on an advertising billboard. These shifts in perspective repeat until the book abandons earth altogether. The last image is a tiny white sphere-our planet-against a night sky."
We used this book for a faith discovery learning exercise on Monday at youth night. It's a great opportunity to stimulate conversation about the importance of being open to different perspectives. We tore the book apart, page by page, and gave each youth a random page and held the rest back. The youths described their pages to the group and then laid them down in what they thought was the right order. They tried to tell the story as they saw it, although they didn't have all the pages. Finally, the rest of the pages were given out and laid down in the complete order of the book.
They suddenly realized how important is to accurately tell the story as you see it and to respect each person's perspective and, at the same time, to keep their minds open for new knowledge. As one youth remarked, there's always more to the story! Nobody ever has sole possession of the whole truth. If only everybody got this message at a young age!
