I Want to Be a Cowboy

Christine Linge MacDonald, a past director of the Toronto & District
Parent Co-operative Preschool Corporation and a freelance writer, is an
elementary school teacher in Whitby, Ontario.

Each eight-inch-square softcover volume in the I Want to Be... series
offers 20 photographic glimpses into the daily lives of various workers.
On each page, a highlighted rectangle contains one or two sentences in
large bold type that either explain the activity in the picture or
extrapolate some truism about the featured profession.

The publisher has made an effort to include images of women and racial
minorities among those pictured. However, the image banks and photo
libraries from which the photographs are drawn are apparently short of
some images—the cowboys, pilots, and firefighters in these books are
portrayed as white males only.

The text is simple, factual, and predictable—all desirable elements
for a primary reader. The selection of images is also predictable,
although I Want to Be a Pilot and I Want to Be a Firefighter fare much
better than others in the excitement department. One should not look to
this series for poetic inspiration that might tempt a child into a
career choice; it does, however, serve quite well as an introduction to
the many different lives that people live, and the way these various
lives might intersect. Recommended.