The tragedies that occurred in the USA on 11 September 2001 are already being reflected significantly in our reference collections. This edition of Fact File contains a section on disasters, which concentrates on New York; this reviewer was not aware until picking it up from this publication that works of art by Rodin, Joan Miro and Roy Lichtenstein were amongst $140,000 worth of art destroyed in the World Trade Center buildings. However, there are other facts relating to world‐wide disasters, from which we learn that although 0.42 percent of the US population was affected by disasters during the decade 1991‐2000, 11.75 percent of the population of Malawi was similarly affected. I was also astonished to learn that 2,400 million people in the world still do not have access to adequate sanitation.
These facts and figures are typical of the sort of material that is provided by this book. There are sections ranging from advertising to work, from animals to women, and from birth to wealth and finance. The last section in the book is simply entitled “The Tops” and gives us top 20 children’s television shows (headed naturally by the Simpsons), top and bottom cities for quality of life (Vancouver and Brazzaville – you can guess which is which!) and, most peculiarly, the three things that British people living abroad most miss (baked beans, tea bags and Kit Kat). What does that tell us about British people who emigrate? Every statistic given has its source dutifully and explicitly quoted and these range from government publications to somewhat dubious Web sites. The publication is clearly intended for pupils in the age range 11 to 16 and collections catering for that group will find Fact File 2002 a useful addition.
Many readers will already be familiar with this family of publications, but for those new to Fact File it is necessary to summarise the forms in which the text is available. Fact File costs £29.95 for a subscription, which saves £10 on the normal price. It is also available in electronic form, which provides the text on a CD‐ROM, enabling the user to search more easily; this format also provides the raw spreadsheet data which can be used to create charts. This can be done by importing the data to a spreadsheet program, facilitating the manipulation of data, choosing from a range of presentations and selecting different elements from the figures. Samples of this can be seen on the Carel Press Web site www.carelpress.com.
