Of Dikes and Windmills.

Rating:
Summary: Superb Illustrations
Review: Of Dikes and Windmills was written and illustrated by the well known children's writer, Peter Spier. His target audience was young adults. "Of Dikes and Windmills" chronciles Holland's long and often times turbulent relationship with the Sea.

Spier has beautiful pen and water color illustrations on nearly every page of the book. There are wonderful illustrations of windmills, canals and the Dutch countryside. I picked up the book for its wonderful illustrations. I read a few pages and fell in love with the writing. Although oriented towards teenagers, the writing will hold an adults' attention.

This is a relatively hard book to find. If it available through an Amazon vendor, order it as soon as possible. Of Dikes and Windmills is a very beautiful book.

Rating:
Summary: Superb appreciation of old Holland
Review: Peter Spier, better known as an illustrator of books for young children, wrote "Of dikes and windmills" in the mid-1960s for older children and teenagers. It is one of those wonderful books which can't be tied down into any one category. A bit of travel-description stuff, more than a little folklore, some history with a heavy emphasis on the lives of ordinary people . . . perhaps you can get the idea. All of it illustrated with Spier's delicate, powerful pen-and-ink drawings. What makes the book special is that although it is consciously up-to-date with respect to the time in which it was written, it is itself part of the history which it describes. The Netherlands which can be found within the pages of this book is a nation with its own sense of national culture and purpose, a sense which above all consists of wrestling with the sea and forcing it to give itself up to the Dutch people. The diking-in and "reclamation" of the Zuider Zee/IJsselmeer is a key story in the book, and in his trumpet-blowing climax Spier writes that he expects the work to be triumphantly finished, after which the Netherlands will go on to dike in the Wadden Zee "sometime in the twenty-first century." Shortly after this book was published the Netherlands underwent the wrenching change of 1968. The people of the Netherlands may want to correct me on this, but looking at material from before this revolution, like this book, makes clear that the attitudes of the Dutch people have irretrevably changed from what they were. The people of the Netherlands have stopped believing in the heroic manipulation of nature. Most of them no longer want to grab more and more land from the sea. The IJsselmeer reclamation is stopped, presumably forever. Increasing numbers of younger Netherlanders see themselves as being citizens of a united Europe. All this sounds like it would make Spier's book out of date. In fact it does the opposite. Spier's affectionate portrait, meant for children, of the mentalities unique to Holland and the other below-sea-level provinces has become a treasure in its own right. As the Nethlerlands as a society and as a country dissolves into the larger Europe, Spier's stories show English-speaking people what needs to be kept alive in this corner of the world in order to maximize the diversity of the human family.