"Go There, All This Is Waiting for You"

"For 15 years Šašek wandered the globe on the mission of making his This Is books, turning out a volume, and sometimes two, almost annually. (How a stateless man managed such an ambitious program of travel—he chose not to apply for citizenship anywhere after leaving Czechoslovakia—is yet another mystery.) By the time he published his final book, This Is Historic Britain, in 1974, the international consciousness he sought to cultivate among his young readers was becoming ever more prevalent. That development was a product of increasing travel (Frommer's Europe on 5 Dollars a Day debuted in 1957), the influence of photojournalism and television, and enterprises such as his own. 'Children today know everything—the world is so much smaller,' he told an interviewer in the late '60s. At the same time, the homogenizing forces of global capitalism were rubbing away the everyday differences among Hong Kong, Greece, and San Francisco, diminishing the distinctiveness he had so ardently chronicled."

Deborah Cohen at The Atlantic reviews Olga Černá, Pavel Ryška, and Martin Salisbury's This Is M. Šašek: The Extraordinary Life and Travels of the Beloved Children's Book Illustrator.