Book - SBS World Guide 16th Edition
SBS has built its reputation on two decades of truly global, quality news services. The 16th edition of its annual World Guide has just been published, and at over eight hundred pages it’s a fact file on over 200 countries that’s every bit as comprehensive as Lee Lin Chin’s wardrobe.
If you were one of those people sitting through the parade of nations that preceded Australia at the Olympics opening ceremony thinking ‘what the hell is Luxembourg? A principality or a protectorate? And what’s the difference anyway?’ the SBS World Guide is for you. But even if you already know that Luxembourg is actually a grand duchy, the Guide is full of facts and stats that will fascinate even the most parochial of minds.
When I won the creative writing competition in year 9, I spent half my prize money on the 1993 edition of The SBS World Guide. I spent the other half on audio recordings of The War Diaries of Réné Artois, so that probably puts the Guide purchase in a bit of perspective, but flipping through the pages now, it’s amazing to see just how much the world has changed in fifteen years. The break-up and make-ups of nation states across the globe make many celebrity weddings look stable. A few new countries have come into existence in that time, most are tiny states (like Kosovo, Montenegro and East Timor) that achieved nation status largely because of diplomatic pressures. All the signs are pointing to these new states being the canaries in the coal mine of globalisation and the continued viability of the nation state.
Diplomacy is not the only force that shapes our world. As the effects of climate change become more pronounced, I wonder if someone reading the Guide in another fifteen years time will find blank pages where Tuvalu and Kiribati are now. In many ways the book is snapshot or time capsule of where we are right now. And while quirks like Tuvalu’s annual 100 tonne taro harvest are interesting enough, the Guide really excels in its extensively researched history sections. As our culture shrinks down to increasingly succinct soundbites and wikifacts, we’re starting to think of knowledge as a process of replacement rather than accumulation – a sort of just-in-time logistics of geopolitical fashion trends where Pristina is just the new Sarajevo, which was the new Zagreb. A book like this is provides some valuable depth of perspective to what is going on in global flashpoints like Darfur, South Ossetia, and The Pier at Walsh Bay.
If nothing else, the SBS World Guide will leave you with a renewed sense of the amazing and bizarre nature of these things we call nations: from tiny San Marino to the fraying-at-the-edges leviathan that is Russia. And failing that, you can become the obnoxious person in the pub trivia team who knows that the fourth official language of Switzerland is Romansh. Start practicing your smug look in the mirror for when the rest of the team overrules you, and you lose by one point to a family of ugly suburbanite midgets with bad teeth.
In fact, The SBS World Guide is so full of languages, cultures, histories and people, that the only question I have left after trawling extensively back and forth through the massive volume is, where in the world is Indira Naidoo?
The SBS World Guide 16th Edition hits stores in September and is published by Hardie Grant Books. RRP $49.95 paperback.
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Christian Taylor
said on the 29th Aug, 2008