The video is best muted. Sound makes it much worse. I have strong mixed feelings about this video and about this pop-up book. I had the book first, for a long time since it came out, and the video only just now. I wish they would knock it off with the "this land is your land" b.s. and state the truth, this land is their land and our visits support their barony over which they rule as their own private property and we are kept out at the drop of a dime while they reserve large portions, the best portions, for their own exclusive use. If you don't believe me, join them, you'll become one yourself instantly and enjoy these property related benefits for yourself. It's all very Communist-minded and so is the pop-up book and so is this video and so is the song they selected to represent their work. So then mute.
The artwork is like the postcards from Wyoming paint-by-number look with rigid unblended shadowing vectored line illustrations. Vector drawing is lines made by points, curves mathematically calculated between points for images that are readily resized by computer.
Five of the six layouts rely on the same basic mechanical idea of a long broad background, a long flat V nearly flattened out entirely but sill a V and one that works to flip up and that defines the whole scene along with the two flat pages of the book, and that drag up with them attachments that fill out the scene. One after another this same idea of panoramic broad V background. But what else can the collaboration do to put viewers into the scene? The exact same thing occurs with another excellent book with different artwork Birdscapes, very well researched and with stereo audio sound to help identify the birds. Educational for people interested in birds for matching sight to sound. But a disappointment nonetheless for pop-up enthusiast used to likes of pop-up engineers Sabuda and of Reinhart who would have racked their brains to avoid repeating structural mechanisms like this. While like those two innovators they do manage extra pop-up mechanisms of card size inserted as tiny books in the areas left blank by the predominant mechanism and scenery, and contrary to those two innovators by including tiny booklets that fill blank spaces that are loaded with text and not loaded with pop-ups that would tell the story or suggest what the text does.
The thing about pop-ups is you needn't explain everything.
If Muir is so important to America's National Parks then he deserves his own pop-up page, not some blurb about him. I object to all the non-pop uppery that forces me to read.
All those words all over the place, even some double pages with no pop-up at all, just words and regular silk-screens of photos, and reading through my postulate about their barony impulses is confirmed as I got farther and farther in descriptions of national parks that are not displayed in pop-up form, so much valuable real estate held in their custody, park after park, Death Valley, Channel Islands Crater Lake, fifty-eight national parks before any mention of a single state. Finally Ohio. Finally Washington. You'd have no idea from the book even with a splendid pop up that shows it, the Everglades is in Florida, or that Smokey Mountain National Park borders Tennessee and N. Carolina, You can look and read all you like and not learn from this book that Grand Canyon National Park is in Arizona although you will know it has something to do with Colorado River. You will learn from text accompanying a dioramic pop-up that the world's first national park is Yellowstone but the book will not tell you the park is in the state of Wyoming. And so on, Glacier National park belongs to the Park Service, belongs to you and me, and we can see the goat right there in the middle on the continental divide and we see the unique bus that take people around if you can only find out for yourself somewhere else and not from this book that first you must go to the sovereign state of Montana. They manage to say so much by what they achingly omit. The book and this video advertise their own attitude that they maintain toward this land they insist in song is made for you and me.
The book is worth it. Recommended.
Several offers on Amazon. They offer the best deal, even better than Abebooks, and it's not that great a deal. Still expensive for a pop-up book. The used books are treated as collectables. One place is asking $70.00. Al the rest about $30.00.
I like my copy. Although I didn't learn any pop-up techniques and I didn't learn anything useful about national parks, it's still nice to have, not everyone feels so sour as I, and children will like this book too.
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