Noth­ing — cer­tain­ly not the ubiq­ui­tous title — dis­tin­guish­es this from the pletho­ra of books about Israel writ­ten by non-spe­cial­ists as parts of series aimed at the school mar­ket. Pho­tographs, fact box­es, maps, graphs, charts, a set of ​“fast facts” about the flag, cap­i­tal, cur­ren­cy, tem­per­a­tures, etc. are all in bright col­ors, engulf­ing the brief, bland text. Each of the two-page ​“chap­ters” answers a ques­tion, such as ​“Where is Israel?” and ​“What is fam­i­ly life like in Israel?” Most of the answers are so gen­er­al as to be almost mean­ing­less. The sec­tion on trans­porta­tion begins with the sen­tence, ​“Peo­ple in Israel dri­ve cars and ride bus­es.” The one on art begins, ​“Paint­ing is com­mon in Israel.” And the one on fam­i­lies says, ​“Fam­i­lies in Israel enjoy their spare time.” Although large­ly non-polit­i­cal in cov­er­age, the sec­tion enti­tled ​“How did Israel become a coun­try?” con­tains two state­ments that are mis­lead­ing because they refer to occu­pied rather than dis­put­ed areas in the Golan Heights and West Bank and to some­thing that nev­er exist­ed, ​“the Pales­tin­ian Arab state.” This despite a con­sul­tant from the Mid­dle East Stud­ies depart­ment of a uni­ver­si­ty list­ed on the title page! More­over, the sec­tion on food describes two non-kosher ​“favorite” dish­es fol­lowed by a ​“Fact!” box stat­ing that ​“meat and dairy prod­ucts can­not be cooked or eat­en togeth­er.” Fol­low­ing this mish­mash are a list of six com­mon words in Hebrew and Ara­bic, a glos­sary, a list of four unre­mark­able books about Israel, a web­site that pro­vides access to sev­er­al excel­lent web­sites, and an index. The read­ing lev­el for this very mar­gin­al pur­chase is ages 7 – 9.