The White Ravens Database

Presented by   Internationale Jugendbibliothek / International Youth Library

Spanish / Spain

Así es la dictadura

(This is dictatorship)

Equipo Plantel (text)
Casal, Mikel (illus.)
Valencia: Media Vaca, 2015. – [42] p.
(Series: Libros para mañana; 2)
ISBN 978-84-943625-1-4

Dictatorship  | Repression  | Politics  | Non-fiction  | Picture book

Reading age: 7+

White Ravens issue: 2016

OPAC

Reading this four-volume book series, whose texts first appeared almost fourty years ago at La Gaya Ciencia Press, one can’t help but be astounded and sobered at how the political and social issues have lost none of their relevancy. The significance of this publishing project becomes apparent when, in the newly added epilogue to the volume “Así es la dictadura”, the editors count about the same number of dictatorial, autocratic regimes in existence as there were at the end of the 1970s. The almost square-shaped, beautifully designed volume is replete with new illustrations by Mikel Casal (b. 1965), whose aesthetic and colouration recall picture books of the 1960s. Text and illustration do not focus on any concrete example but instead prototypically describe how dictators think, how they exert their repressive reign and quash all resistance. The endpapers provide concrete examples by lining up twenty-four infamous dictators of the 20th and 21st centuries.