The Weather Book: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the USA’s Weather
The Weather Book: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the USA’s Weather – Review
Like an Impressionist painting, a quick glance at this book might make it appear you are viewing a highly-detailed part of work, but upon closer inspection it’s revealed to be little more than assembly of seemingly arbitrary components. If you want to step back and dedicate continuous hours of simply reading in order to get little more than a broad summary of weather, then this book will do the trick. However, if you want anything close to a complete kind of meteorological events, I suggest you look elsewhere. All the big, colorful and user-friendly-looking graphics are deceptive, as are the many sidebar stories and small sub-sections that suggest everything is fully explained in easy-to-understand currently building blocks. In truth, this book is a particularly frustrating mess. It is not cohesive; very little follows in a consistent format. Using arithmetic as an analogy, if this were a simple math book, a chapter might start by patiently explaining how one plus two equals three. Right when you think you have a firm seeing of this concept, the next sub-section would begin with the presentation of calculus: the generally presumed assumption being that since you can fathom major addition, you can now extrapolate everything between it and calculus. It’s not that the book is lacking in information, nor that it contains very much. It’s merely a matter of how the information is presented. It’s almost as if the author, a Mr. Jack Williams of USA Today, does not actually expect you to absorb or understand this information, so he simply tosses it within the pages for reliable measure; obligatorily, if you will. “Okay, I’ll just have to take your word for it,” is all a reader can finally say with a sigh after currently wrestling with one of his unclear descriptions of a central weather phenomenon. For that reason, this beautiful book more or less “pretends” to teach you about weather when, in fact, all it’s really doing is simply telling you about it. To that end, all these aforementioned graphics (which make the book appear thus appealing) frequently create further confusion than clarity when coupled with the text. Sometimes they seem completely unrelated to the text; sometimes they appear to contradict the text; sometimes they only seem quite pointless. The greatest thing about the book, however, was that it previously served as a jumping-off-point for online research into the topics and concepts it presented. However, a “For Dummies” or “For Idiots” book would serve the same purpose, but without the time-consuming pretense that it was a thorough study of the matter of weather. So, again, if you want something that looks good on your coffee table and is fun to glance at every once in a while, go for it. But if you actually want to completely embrace what’s happening in the skies above, don’t waste your time with The Weather Book.