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The Directory of Flags: A guide to flags from around the world
For thousands of years, flags have been used to identify countries and cultures, people and places. Today, the flags of the world can still provide a key to discovering national identity and history of each and every country in the international community. Presented in a neat directory format, this book offers nearly 300 flags, each alongside the story of its provenance and design.
- GenresReferenceNonfiction
224 pages, Hardcover
First published April 30, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 3, 2016
I am a sucker for this kind of trivia, so I enjoyed it somehow. However, for a book with so little text it was madly repetitive. I don't think any country would say "the red in our flag stands for the hemorrhoids of our people" or "white is for the blankness of mind of our society". Of course, the red is for the martyr blood and white is for purity; you do not need to say it 40 times!
August 20, 2022
2.5 Stars!
This edition was published back in 2017, and five years is a long time in politics and by proxy in flags too, with the likes of Mauritania (2017) and Mississippi (2021) changing flags and Macedonia has now become North Macedonia and Swaziland has turned into Eswatini, to name just a few of the developments.
Somewhere, someone, sometime stumbled upon the idea, “Wow! Wouldn’t it be a great idea to depict flags rippling in the wind in reference books?!”. As if our imaginations have gotten so bad that we can’t picture it for ourselves. So straight off the bat this book loses a star, falling for that gimmick, we get most flags shown twice, (in case we didn’t believe them the first time) a larger image of it flapping away and a smaller static image. First of all that’s idiocy you should have had it the other way around.
Secondly the section on the US state flags was so lazy as to be a waste of time, just a frustrating series of flags waving in the wind, so that you cannot make out the actual detail. So the core point of this reference book is sacrificed for a pointless gimmick. Who thought this was a good idea?...Why the need to reinvent the wheel?...This is just another example of someone coming up with something “new” regardless of the value. This is far from the only publishing company doing it, I know even the likes of DK loves a bit of it too.
There were typos that should have been spotted in such a text light, fact based book, Rangoon/Yangon has not been the capital of Myanmar for some time. Otherwise we get some good historical, political and religious grounding behind the vexillology, though a glossary would have been nice. The text is nicely written, with crisp fact panels and informative details shared, and the country highlighted within the map is also a useful touch, but this just makes the graphic choice with the flags all the more puzzling. So in many ways this was an opportunity wasted, all of the otherwise sound research and pleasing layout are let down by the most crucial part, the flags.
This edition was published back in 2017, and five years is a long time in politics and by proxy in flags too, with the likes of Mauritania (2017) and Mississippi (2021) changing flags and Macedonia has now become North Macedonia and Swaziland has turned into Eswatini, to name just a few of the developments.
Somewhere, someone, sometime stumbled upon the idea, “Wow! Wouldn’t it be a great idea to depict flags rippling in the wind in reference books?!”. As if our imaginations have gotten so bad that we can’t picture it for ourselves. So straight off the bat this book loses a star, falling for that gimmick, we get most flags shown twice, (in case we didn’t believe them the first time) a larger image of it flapping away and a smaller static image. First of all that’s idiocy you should have had it the other way around.
Secondly the section on the US state flags was so lazy as to be a waste of time, just a frustrating series of flags waving in the wind, so that you cannot make out the actual detail. So the core point of this reference book is sacrificed for a pointless gimmick. Who thought this was a good idea?...Why the need to reinvent the wheel?...This is just another example of someone coming up with something “new” regardless of the value. This is far from the only publishing company doing it, I know even the likes of DK loves a bit of it too.
There were typos that should have been spotted in such a text light, fact based book, Rangoon/Yangon has not been the capital of Myanmar for some time. Otherwise we get some good historical, political and religious grounding behind the vexillology, though a glossary would have been nice. The text is nicely written, with crisp fact panels and informative details shared, and the country highlighted within the map is also a useful touch, but this just makes the graphic choice with the flags all the more puzzling. So in many ways this was an opportunity wasted, all of the otherwise sound research and pleasing layout are let down by the most crucial part, the flags.
February 8, 2024
The book is straightforward and informative. It referenced historical flags, and it would have been nice to have some of those included.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews