Weather Books

I read this book for a summer reading assignment. I began the book dreading it thinking that it would be unbearable boring and hard to get through, after all a book only on history of a body of water sounded quite boring. Fortunately i was pleasantly surprised when the book featured a interesting history of the inhabitants of the long island sound and not only facts about the LIS. The only critical thing i can say about this book is that it is at times repetitive and i felt like i had already been enriched enough as it was. The chapters on lobsters and oysters seemed to be continuing what had been said 10 pages earlier. These chapters were also jam packed with statistics which was good and bad but i ended up forgetting most of them as it was. All in all this book really made me feel like i needed to take an active part in helping the long island sound and helping to improve its beauty to what it was many many years ago. This book although not action packed was fulfilling and not a bad read even if you want to read it for joy.

What a fantastic book. As a marine biology educator on Long Island Sound, I found this book to be an essential part of my course. I am requiring it as summer reading for my course. It is full of history and information. If you use the Sound at all, this book is a must read!

I came across this book while doing research for a segment that I was going to do for National Public Radio. Since I am only 15 I wasn't really around to witness the battle to save LIS, and I needed to know some history about the area from that time. This book helped the most out of all the materials that I read. It started by describing the time European sailors first laid their eyes on LIS to present day. He takes you on a journey through all of LIS history and presents every point of view when explaining the battle conservationists had to fight to get the government to cooperate. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in LIS. It is not a book that takes a lot of past knowledge to read, but very informative. Good work Mr. Andersen. A lot of work went into this book and it shows.

This book was not what I expected. It was informative, but very wordy. I wasn't able to use this book with my children at school.

I was given this book by my aunt who moved to Point Barrow, Alaska to be a teacher there. She gave me this book to teach me about where she was to be living. This book taught me a lot in a very educational way. I highly recommend it, The pictures are great too!!

This is one of the best written, most comprehensive and accurate children's books about Alaska that I have found. The illustrations are well drawn and clever. This book holds the interest of young children and I would recommend it as a great addition to any young child's library.

I bought this for my 3 1/2 year old because he is fascinated with tornadoes. The illustrations were great and the descriptions were basic enough that he could understand them. He was able to follow along and look at the pictures as well as ask questions about them. Though not as indepth as some of the other tornado books I have reviewed, it's still a very nice book. It also gives great information on what to do if a tornado strikes.

...with it's ability to explain this twist of nature at a level young children can understand. I was most impressed with the fact that not only does it describe the scientific aspects of tornado formation in simple terms, it also discusses tornado safety by giving kids several examples of where they might be when a tornado hits and the best place to take cover for each situation. While the publisher lists ages 4-8 as the targeted reading level, I found with our library groups at school that our 9-11 year olds were very interested in it as well. If you have younger children and live in an area where tornadoes are a real threat, I highly recommend using this book to introduce tornado safety.

I got this book from the library this spring to explain tornadoes to my 4-year-old son. It covered everything it needed to in one small and attractive book. The pages are not too long that he was not able to sit through it, and the illustrations are attractive and provoking. First it explains what a tornado is, where they occur, how they occur, when, and finally what to do if you encounter one. It does touch on the damage that a tornado causes, including speaking briefly about deaths. But I thought it was done in a straightforward manner and did not dwell on the topic or sensationalize it. I definitely think kids from the age of 4 and up could handle all the information in this book.

Do you know how rain is formed? Do you know when tornado season is? If you want to know these questions read the Magic Tree House book Twisters by Mary Pope Osborn and Sal Murdocca. Read this nonfiction book and learn how hail is formed,learn what is the worst storm. Also there are some sweet experiments. This is an awesome book I loved it a lot. Go to the book store near you and get this book or any Magic Tree House book.

The book that I'm reviewing in school is Twisters and it's by Mary Pope Osborne. I think this book deserves four stars because it is an interesting book to read. The book I'm reading is about weather. They talk about twisters, hurricanes, storms and other cool things. One thing that I learned is hail can be the size of a golf ball. Also, there are different kinds of hail sizes, like the size of a ant. I would recommend this book to a friend because if you're doing research you could find great information. Other books by this author are research guides on other topics.

Emerson, NJ Fifth Grader

Twisters are tornadoes. I learned about them in the book Twisters by Will Osborne. Twisters wreak everything. Twisters can destroy homes because the winds go 300 miles per hour. They hit in the midwestern U.S. in April, May and June. I feel excited about this book because it's good to know about natural disasters so if it happens you'll be prepared.

I borrowed this book from the library and my two year old loved it so much I had to buy it. She loves the pictures...especially the puppy "sipping tea". I was surprised that it struck such a chord with her since we live in Florida and she has never even seen snow! This is a delightful book.

In this simple picture story book we meet a little girl. She is getting all dressed for a day of playing in the snow. She puts on a hat and a hood and several sweaters. She's all dressed and goes outside. When she gets there she says that she hopes she doesn't fall down because she will never be able to get back up. She has so many layers on she can hardly move.
We read this story to my 1 ½ year old sister. She enjoyed looking at the winter time scence in the story as I read her th e book.


We recommend this book for kids ages 1-3. The text is short and simple.

There is just something about this book. Under My Hood I Have a Hat appears to strike a chord with every preschooler who hears it. This simple rhyming book tells the story of a child getting dressed to go out in cold, snowy weather. Written in a "chant" cadence, it goes through the layers and layers of clothes that must be put on just to go out to walk the dog. At the end, it expresses a humorous warning that the child, now swaddled up like a giant beach ball, must not fall, because, she "can't get up at all." This ending invariably makes my 3 year old giggle and ask if the girl in the pictures is making snow angels.

This book has bright, simple, colorful illustrations that pop off the page. The chanting rhyme of the story is easy to learn and to remember. My daughter's preschool teacher tells me that the entire class loves this book and requests it often; they all end up chanting the story in unison. It is quite amazing that a book about cold weather and snow would make such an impression on young kids in Austin, Texas who have most likely never seen snow.

This is a great "read to me, Mommy" book, as well as an easy beginning reader. My daughter and I have great fun with it.

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.