Drug Trafficking
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Cover Story
This issue's cover is a photograph of Anne Frank whose diary is discussed by Michael Rosen fifty years after its first publication. Following the arrest of the Frank family and their companions, the secret annex in Amsterdam where they had been in hiding was locked up and everybody forbidden to enter it, since Jewish possessions became Nazi property and were carted away. Before this happened, the young woman, Miep Gies, who had provided those in hiding with food and who had a second key to the annex, risked herself once more by entering it. Miep retrieved Anne's diary from the devastation together with the Frank family photograph album.
Thanks to Penguin Children's Books for help in reproducing this cover.
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Drug Trafficking
If ever there was a prize for tricksy page design, this title would be well up in the running. Pages from note-books with filing-cards 'paper-clipped' to them, bits of pages 'torn' from books and overlayed 'windows' as though from a computer screen and I can't decide whether I love it or loathe it. There is certainly no shortage of information on the production, transportation and detection of drugs and we are taken off on various side-tracks including the information that in Candide Voltaire wrote about a woman who smuggled diamonds by stuffing them inside her body - though a discreet veil is drawn over where. The book is up-to-date enough to include the drugs-related murder of Irish journalist Veronica Guerin in Dublin last June. If I have not quite talked myself into loving it, I can at least see this title's good points. However, I wonder if young people are quite as visually literate as they are often assumed to be - I think they would benefit more from a cleaner, less cluttered page to look at.
