Weather Books

A remarkable book of photos that only half works. I say this because I have just read a fascinating interview with Steven Smith by photographer Christopher Sims on the Duke/CDS Books website (I've no idea how long it will be available). Smith explains in careful detail his thoughts on the housing and commercial development in the western states and his working techniques. An edited version of this interview really should have been included to make this the almost perfect photobook.

The eighty-two photos, beautifully printed in an impressively fine screen, are quite technical, overviews of developments showing potential roads, house plots and the way contractors prepare the land, down to details of landscaping for individual homes. Having looked through these photos several times I find there is another editorial weakness to the book, the photos show things that make me ask: 'What's going on here?' For instance, page fifty-one shows lines of piping on a gravel roadway or wide path, the caption says 'Heating coils, Mapleton, Utah, 1999', I really want to know more but this is an 'art' book, so tough. This 'art' book status is also confirmed by having all the very short captions on a couple of pages in the back of the book. They of course should have been centered under each photo.

Steven Smith clearly has something to say with his excellent photographs but I was disappointed that the book's editorial format did not allow them to work as well as they should. A similar book about the hand of (commercial) man on the landscape that I have enjoyed is 'Consuming the American Landscape' (ISBN 1904587003) by photographer John Ganis. This book has a large landscape format that allows the color photos to work so well and a caption under each photo, too.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

I thought Steven Smith's photographs were revelatory in their understated, droll take on our new westward expansion. And I couldn't agree more with Robert Pinsky, now that he's pointed it out (see his recent comments on slate.com), that there is something South Parkian about it all: "Smith's black-and-white photographs share some visual qualities with the cartoon-colored townscape of the TV series: stark expanses where the monumental blankness of a Utah or Colorado sky meets the equally blank geometry of irrigation pipes or two-car garages. Between mountains and fences, between a tremendous rock face and giant stacks of plywood, Smith's images record not so much a contrast as two violent absences joining as a single force. Landfill, seedling, turnabout, heating coil collude with the sky and mountains in a triumph of disproportion: scale not so much confused or lost as irrelevant: a loss of footing that is a visual equivalent for the moral goofs and chasms of South Park. The deadpan, improvised juncture of immensity and triviality: that harsh, uninflected tone [is] shared by these amazing works." That about sums it up.

This re-visitation of a new topographic concept allows reflection as well as momentary relief from the unending rough and tumble of our ever-expanding lives. It does this by offering amazing aesthetic consideration of a subject matter that often confounds by forcing the laugh most commonly associated with a dirty joke (we might not want others to hear us telling,) and by providing a visual anchor for which we may consider the consequences of an overwhelming capitalist expansion.

Ted Kooser's poetry is lovely. "Sparklers" on page 79 is a beautifully spare poem that really spoke to me.

After reading Weather Central it is easy to understand why Ted Kooser is sometimes called the poet laureate of Nebraska. He writes with eloquence of barn owls, potatoes, spider eggs, sparklers, baseball and the prairie so that they matter to the reader wherever they might live. These poems do not rely on obscure references, contorted images, or pretension. They are powerful because we see that our own lives are poems that are being created each day. With 20/20 vision Kooser puts them on the page for us.

Although I didn't think this collection was quite as good as Delights & Shadows or his Selected Poems, Weather Central is a fine collection of poems. I recommend "Four Secretaries", "In Passing", "A Statue of the Unknown Soldier", and "Weather Central." The poems seem to be a bit longer than what he usually writes, though the rest of Kooser's characteristics are here. He still is plainspoken. He is still a simple poet. He's still a poet everyone can love.

This 60-page early reference book is great for 3rd and 4th graders wondering how lightning and thunder happen.

It removes their fear.

The book opens with a chapter inaptly labeled Drama, which provides myriad facts about lightning and thunder. For example, at any given moment 2,000 thunderstorms are happening on Earth, which adds up to about 16 million thunderstorms a year. Like fingerprints, each lightning bolt differs from all others. Kids also learn here about Zeus and his mythic temper and Thor, the Viking God of lightning and thunder, who threw hammers at his enemies. Three brief sections discuss Ben Franklin's famous kite-flying experiment, weather forecasting and storm chasers.

Kids next learn how clouds form. Clouds can be small or huge, reaching 60,000 feet--taller than Mount Everest. Thunderstorms require warm air, which explains why many storms occur near the Equator. Indonesia's Java Island typically has thunderstorms on 223 days out of the year. The Southeastern U.S. also gets lots of thunderstorms. Kids also learn in this chapter the three stages of thunderstorms.

The third chapter discusses the types of electricity, including the static variety that causes lightning. Kids learn about the various types of lightning--sheet, ribbon, bead, ball and fork--as well as what causes thunder. When lightning flashes, the air through which it travels heats up to about 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which quickly causes rapid loud shock waves that make huge booms. There are several types of thunder, too.

Chapter 4 discusses what happens when lightning strikes. It includes 10 pages of beautiful photographs.

Next kids meet two young survivors of lightning strikes. Chapter 5 also provides several websites that discuss lightning strikes and storm safety. The latter is also covered in Chapter 6.

A fine book. Alyssa A. Lappen

The book is about lightning and thunderstorms and what they can do. One strike from a bolt of lightning could easily kill you. Very few people have survived getting hit from lightning.

I enjoyed reading the book because it is interesting. It shows stories about people who survived lightning. It tells you how to be safe in a thunderstorm.

I would recommend this book to a friend because you would learn a lot about lightning. I wanted to read it because lightning is fascinating. I think its cool.

The pictures were colored photographs of thunderstorms. There was not a lot of pictures, but they were good ones.

What I have learned from this book is that there is lightning that you cannot see. With invisible lightning, you can see the clouds light up. You still hear the thunder, the lightning is inside the cloud. The thunder might also be because of the sonic boom that the lightning makes. When something goes at the speed of sound, or faster, the sound waves get messed up and make this booming sound, called a sonic boom.

There is ball lightning that has been claimed to have been seen many times. Not much is known about ball lightning, it stays there for a couple of seconds in a ball.

After all lightning occurs, there is a smaller strike that comes up from the ground. It is very high voltage electricity. The static electricity forms from the clouds rubbing together and makes the high voltage electricity that we call lightning.

You can protect yourself from lightning by crouching down, not laying down because if you lay down, the counter strike from the ground can hurt you. If you stand up, the going down lightning hits the tallest thing possible. You should be away from any water because water conducts electricity and therefore if you're near water, the electric bolt can be duplicated and can hurt you.

The safest place to be in a thunderstorm is inside a house or inside a hard top car. On every house or building, there is a lightning rod that conducts electricity and sends it straight to the ground. In the car, the rubber from the wheels won't let the lightning get into the car.

The thunderstorm is created when ice and water mix and mix inside clouds creating static electricity and lightning. There needs to be a lot of ice and water to start raining, they keep on building up into the clouds until the cloud is too full and they fall out. Only certain kinds of clouds that create thunderstorms.

There is a story about a boy named Nathan. His mom and dad were out and he had to watch his younger brother. His mom called and told him about the thunderstorm that was going to come, so he went to get his kitties out of the garage. He didn't want them to get hurt. When he was going out, he touched the door knob and got struck by lightning. He didn't think he went unconscious. He thought he was going to die. Everything was numb and burnt on his body. He tried getting out of the garage again and it worked. He was able to open the door. When he told his younger brother to call 911, his younger brother thought it was a joke. When he took his shirt off, his brother believed him and called 911 because he was all burnt. Nathan thought he was going to die for the first couple of days in the hospital. After a month or two, he was able to go back to school. He was 12 years old at the time.

Great book to teach everyone storm safety. I am especially partial to the book because my son was struck by lightning and his story is featured in this book! Most people do not understand the dangers of lightning and this book helps others understand the importance of weather safety.

My daughter loves Blue but for some reason this book does not capture her attention like the other books we own. Maybe it is because she does not understand fog yet or why the wind blows things into the yard? She is 29 mos old now. Regardless of that, we love Blue and maybe the book will hold her interest when she is a bit older.

This book is for all you diehard Blues Clues fans! My 3 year old still likes Blues Clues..even tho Bob the Builder is around and Rollie Pollie Ollie! Heck, I like them too! So..go ahead..buy this book!

This book is excellent! I have a 20 month old who loves Blue's Clues and we have recently discovered this book series. As any fan of this show would expect, this book offers plenty of opportunities to interact with your child as they discover the effects of different types of weather in Blue's backyard. My child's language development has been enhanced by naming and pointing to the items in the brilliantly colored pictures. This book immediately captured my child's attention and even though we read it every day she still gets excited when I pull it out for her! As a Child Development Specialist by day and a Mommy by night, I can't say enough good things about this board book and the others offered in this series!

The book has bright illustrations and has the word in English then in Spanish. It has pronunciations for the Spanish. It has only the word for English then Spanish on each page. This book would be a good starter or word enforcer for a little kid.

Very simple word book introduces 11 weather related words in English and Spanish. Does what it sets out to do. My only complaint is the illustration showing lightening shows a bear-child riding a bike, something that children should know not to do. Karen Woodworth-Roman, Children's Science Book Review

My daughter was 2 when I bought this book, along with a few other bilingual French/English books, for her. This one wasn't a huge hit because it didn't have a "story". I should imagine most parents teaching their children a (non-native) second language would have a dictionary - well, you could do the job of this book with just some pictures and a basic French dictionary. Vocab is easy to learn from a dictionary, it's the grammar that you get from stories that really helps you grasp a foreign language. So for that reason, we're steering clear of the "word" books now and just reading the stories. My daughter is nearly 3 now, she doesn't speak much French at all, but she loves the stories I read in French, even though she doesn't understand them word-for-word.

"Active Tectonics And Alluvial Rivers" comes with a trio of authors that certainly sounds authoritative and reliable, although Dumont was unknown to me thus far (my bad!), but the names of Schumm and Holbrook definitely were enough for me...
The main value of this quick and agile treatise lies in being possibly the first one specifically dealing with the relationship between tectonics and all manners of fluvial affairs. Treatments in recent textbooks by Miall and Bridge also cover the topic of course, but in this case we meet with unprecedented focus...

In these days of explosion in research in all of the Earth sciences, it is not surprising that even an essay on such a specialized subject has to be structured in an intricate series of chapters and subsections ranging widely over many different subdisciplines and topics. The list of contents shows coverage of essentially all of the main aspects of fluvial geomorphology, hydrology and sedimentology in relation to factors of active tectonic control, positively highlighting throughout the importance of both forward and inverse approaches to the analysis of a wide range of field and laboratory (flume) case studies, including relevant work by the authors themselves...

The main letdown for me, however, came exactly from the general content of the book! I suppose no one would be daring to delve into the complexities of interactions between fluvial processes and tectonic controls without being fairly well grounded in the basics of the subject... Yet, I was left with a feeling that the authors all too easily glossed over an introduction to some main theoretical aspects of relevance to all the discussions that would follow. The structure of the whole book essentially consists in a long series of (even too) detailed descriptions and discussions of case studies, an approach that inevitably brings about some discontinuity. This doesn't really help the reader in forming a logical thread of synthesis on his mind, busy as he must be in making sense of all the different examples. Chapter summaries won't help either, as they often appear to be too cursory and simplistic, and in a couple of instances even report observations on issues that are not so relevant to what has been discussed, such as in chapter five on "Earthquake effects"! The final result is therefore that the reader is left with quite some homework to do in order to come out with general insights and principles from a somewhat spotty and fragmented maze of case studies...
On the other hand, it is to be considered, as well, that the subject has never undergone extensive review in the past, and that its inherent difficulties (let's face it, anything river-related is a tricky mess!! By far the most complex geomorphic systems...) imply an open road ahead for research, still to be fully explored. So, although lacking in explicit overview, the book was not and could not have been intended to provide easy or ready-made answers! Let's say that a second, more careful read can clear up the mind and aid in pinpointing a few principles of general relevance...
Of possible help however could be a paper published by two of the authors, which though much less detailed, contains the most interesting hints and observations you could gather from the book in a much more concise version! (Holbrook & Schumm, 1999, "Geomorphic and sedimentary response of rivers to tectonic deformation: a brief review and critique of a tool for recognizing subtle epeirogenic deformation in modern and ancient settings"", Tectonophysics 305: 287-306)

In spite of my rather substantial criticism, I guess it's fair to say that as an introduction to the subject this little treatise should not be missed by anyone interested! A second edition could come up with updates from a steadily growing body of literature, and above all with more introductory and summarizing background all throughout, in order to better lead the reader toward understanding and, why not, inspiration for further research...

This is the first book, in my opinion, to really focus on the effects of active tectonics in the fluvial system regime. Many books focus on tectonic geomorphology or fluvial geomorphology, but none has integrated both subject areas for a thorough discussion on the integration of the two.

I really appreciated that the authors concentrated on case studies rather than jargon. The two background chapters are sufficient to start the advanced reader on the extremely interesting case studies. I also appreciated the division of the case studies into forward and inverse modeling approaches.

The applicatons section was full of studies of modern approaches in engineering, stratigraphy, and neotectonic interpretation.

Overall, this book was the perfect synthesis of tectonics and fluvial systems. Stan Schumm is a master on river morphology. He and Holbrook and Dumont should be commended on their effort!

There have been many books about the history of maps, but few have addressed one of the types of maps that we consult most regularly: the weather map. Monmonier, a professor of geography at Syracuse University and author of several previous books, endeavors to remedy this deficiency and does so admirably.

He goes back to the earliest days of investigating the weather, before telephone or telegraph when any weather map had to be put together days or more after the fact. But it gets done, even so, and when higher-speed communications are available, people are ready.

He goes on to cover developments both technological and social: the advent of radar as a weather detection tool as well as the now-routine weather satellite views, but also how the weather is covered in the news, including the development of the newspaper weather map from the dull black-and-white diagrams that were once routine to the multicolored glory of USA Today's weather map.

There's weather on television, too, and he spends time talking about both The Weather Channel's coverage with their many maps on a chroma-key background and how local stations cover the weather using the latest in technology, from doppler radar to the fancy, fly-through 3-D graphics that many of them seem to use these days.

My personal preference would have been to learn more about the earliest days of the weather maps and how they were developed and less about the development of the glitzy modern weather reporting, but perhaps that is just me, and, considering the ubiquity of the latter, I can't fault its inclusion.

Overall, it's a well-written, good read, and highly recommended for the weather fanatics among us (and I must include myself!).

This book uses weather maps as a central motif. It discusses issues of meteorology (although it is not really a primer on meteorology, as suggested by the Scientific American review), cartography, graphic design, and mass media. It is lightly written but well documented and intelligently illustrated. It is a great read for those who enjoy science books.

I enjoyed this book very much and it was a very comforting read for my child. I too went through that terrible storm (I lived near the author) and it was as devastating as it was an awesome show of natures strength. It is a wonderfully written book and it ends sweetly as it starts. Kids of all ages will enjoy it.

Soothes kids fears about hurricanes and natural disasters. Great pictures.

My 6-year old daughter and I love this book, which is filled with delightful poems and colourful paintings about autumn. The author uses a lot of plays on words which are quite amusing, and his poems really capture the images and feelings of autumn. If you like the fall season you will love this book. I would recommend it especially for kindergarden teachers.

Complementing Winter Eyes and Summersaults, Autumnblings is another of Florian's delightful poetic romps through the season, a series of silly poems accompanied by the usual quirky and humorous illustrations the author does so well.

"Maple seeds in fall turn brown,
then they fall off and all fall down-
like fallicopters to the ground."

Florian is a personal favorite because his lively poetry and images stimulate young minds and plant the seeds of reading enjoyment. Learning is a positive experience in every book this author/illustrator contributes to young minds, a consistent energy that is engaging and fanciful, to be shared or read aloud.

"The temperature falls
Degree by degree.
It falls through the air
And lands upon me."

Luan Gaines/2005.

Very good book about weather hazards for B.C. and the Yukon. A must have if you are planning to do any flying in this mountainous region.

This is a text book type look at the weather systems that are common in British Columbia and the Yukon. Very well researched and documented with facts as well as anecdotal observations. A must for pilots venturing into this vast wilderness area.