SEASON’S READINGS : Embarrassment of Riches : In this season of sumptuousness, a reminder that the goods are not evenly distributed : MATERIAL WORLD, A Global Family Portrait <i> By Peter Menzel</i> , <i> (Sierra Club Books: $30; 256 pp.) </i>

Everything about this time of year drives a person to disgust or despair over the amount of stuff we all have--and by stuff I mean material possessions, not mental baggage. What to offer as a gift to the person who already owns every item known to man? (A donation card? Don’t you hate getting those notices yourself? Don’t you wish people would give to charities in silence?) How to keep from wincing at “God bless you, Merry Christmas” from the panhandler as you drive away in your warm car? How to make a little space in the closet for visiting relatives? Can Goodwill come collect before the holidays? How can you own so many towels and have none that are presentable?

Now imagine that a photographer rings your doorbell and says: “I would like you to drag everything you own out of your house and arrange it on your front lawn, so I can shoot a picture of it. Then we’ll make a list of your possessions--would you be so good as to tell me the one item you value the most?--and we’ll print it in a book about what people own in different societies all over the world. Oh, you’ll have to pose in the picture, too. Just try to look normal and ignore the moving crew, please.”

Would you scream and slam the door shut? Fortunately, enough people accepted this lunatic proposition that Peter Menzel, genius of the project he calls “Material World,” could put together a book that compares the worldly wealth of 30 families in as many countries. His photographers fanned out over the globe, from Iceland to Africa, Mongolia to Mexico, to spend a week with each family documenting their daily lives. The week’s visit would culminate in “The Big Picture,” the portrait of the entire household: people, possessions, pets, everything the family considered its material wealth.

The method of the project, which was funded by organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations, was to seek “typical” families in each country. In addition to the itemized list of the family’s possessions, each section includes statistics about the family (how many members, size of house, length of work week, percentage of income spent on food, etc.) and about the general population of the country (density, fertility rate, life expectancy, rank of affluence among the members of the U.N.).

The set of Big Pictures is the heart of the book, and they are endlessly fascinating. Besides the curiosity factor, these include some photo gems. The portrait of the Kuwaiti family is perhaps the most spectacular, an aerial shot taken at sunset with the city lights coming on behind them and a pink glow illuminating their possessions grouped by room on rich rugs laid out on the sand, ending with four cars and a 45-foot sofa.

The Israeli family, in order to be seen outside their house, is hoisted by crane to balance on a platform outside their fourth-floor apartment with all their possessions--including their car. The neighbors gawking up at this procedure add a nice detail, and incidentally provide a small sidelight on the community this family lives in. Few of the other portraits include outsiders--with the notable exception of the Bosnian family, which poses outside their heavily damaged building guarded by two United Nations soldiers.

On the poor end of the spectrum--Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Guatemala--you scan the picture for what is there and what is missing. (Those Uzbek quilts and rugs are spectacular, and would cost a fortune here, but that’s about all the family does own.) And there is also something curiously missing on the rich end of the spectrum: junk. Yes, the Texans have a wallful of family portraits on display, and a shelf of stuffed animals. But where are the masses of rubber bands and bits of string? The jars of condiments used once and forgotten? The broken garden shears? The not-yet-discarded tennis shoes? The leftover tile from the kitchen remodel? The more stuff a family owns, the less junk they bothered to put on display. Only the Chinese family appears not to have had the services of the Architectural Digest house-cleaning crew before the shoot.

The family sections are punctuated occasionally by photo spreads of global comparisons: meals of the world, toilets of the world. The food segment mostly demonstrates that in between plum exotic assignments like this one photographers probably make their living shooting advertisements; these meals are improbably and uniformly appetizing. The toilets, on the other hand, are not.

A third set of comparison photos is entitled “televisions of the world.” We know that everyone in the world gets CNN, so we’re not surprised that TVs are everywhere, even in the portable Mongolian home. The few households represented here that do not have television usually have radio instead--to keep in touch with soccer, but that should not surprise us, either, after last summer’s World Cup education.

While the ubiquitousness of the media surprises no one any more, there are more subtle shocks of the familiar, and this is where the book’s humanity works its deepest magic. To my urban, North American mind, the almost entirely handmade world of the Natomo family in Mali--baked mud walls, wooden utensils, hand-knotted fishing nets--is exotic and incomprehensible. This family includes on its slender list of possessions a broken clay pot. Is this still a useful possession, I wonder? Why not throw it away? But also on their list I find an item that offers me a glimmer of familiarity: a plastic washtub. In that negligible plastic item--which, after all, needs to be purchased somewhere--I can suddenly read the familiar decision-making about household details: Do I really need another tub, or can I scrub the old one and make do until next spring? That gives me a greater feeling of connection with the wife in this family--with the two wives, actually--than the less surprising knowledge that their husband, like mine, spends his free afternoons with his ear bent to the ballgame.

What is not answered in these pages is the question of happiness. Are people with more stuff happier? Are people with less stuff happier? There is in the end no Big Picture here, just glimpses at stray bits of facts from odd angles. But there is enough to set anyone’s mind wandering over the issues of material possession. And who knows?--perhaps the monk, the last family member on the right in the Bhutan photo, will inspire someone to give up the Land Rover and home entertainment center. But then, that monk probably came to visit with the family just while Peter Menzel’s crew was there; after all, everyone the world round values entertainment. Maybe the real wisdom, then, is not to be too attached to anything . . . even to one’s distaste for wealth? *