Pick Me Up

David Roberts and Jeremy Leslie

Dorling Kindersley

1405316217

Oct 2006

‘Pick Me Up’ was the showcase new publication by Dorling Kindersley, offering a new means for cataloguing the information of the traditional children’s reference encyclopaedia that draws upon the tangential sensibilities of web-browsing. This makes it possible to follow interest areas from Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), through to colonisation, to World War Two, arriving at the prehistoric via a journey of oil! Linkage between knowledge area and these ‘learning trails’ make for a particularly impressive journey of discovery.
As with any reference work whose knowledge-base and scope is so wide, ‘Pick Me Up’ deals, for the most part, with its topics quite cursorily as such the book provides a useful ‘backbone’ to reference collections and a springboard from which it is possible to garner that all-too-rare and real context and understanding to given topics and to leap-frog into more in depth publications and websites as the desire takes.
As with a standard encyclopaedia, the work is structured under disciplinary subject areas ‘ ‘Science, technology and space’, ‘Society, places and beliefs’, ‘History’, ‘The natural world’, ‘People who made the world’, ‘Arts, entertainment and media’, ‘You and your body’ and ‘Planet Earth’. This gives options for more standard usage by readers alongside those who wish to meander along ‘learning trails’.
The highly illustrated, magazine-style content, makes the book both easy on the eye and quick to engage with and from which to assimilate knowledge. A wide-reaching and thoughtfully structured development to the often seemingly static reference genre, a picture perhaps of the future?