This book’s title makes it sound like a field guide to clouds, and to some extent it is, but, what a field guide! The illustrations are by the likes of Constable, Doré, Turner, Monet, Courbet and many others.
But it really is about clouds as the author is an atmospheric scientist and former editor-in-chief of the Royal Meteorological Society’s journal Weather.
So here we learn to identify clouds and to understand their physics, classification, names and how and why rain and snow fall out of them. It’s easy to believe, as one learns some physics while looking at a Turner sky, that the author has won awards for his lecturing.
This book captured me and by the end of it I really had looked at clouds from ‘both sides, now’ and really did know clouds quite a bit better.
The cover? It gives a good impression of the art that is inside the covers that wouldn’t be remotely signalled by the book’s title and that is a good thing. I’d give the cover 8/10.
Clouds: how to identify nature’s most fleeting forms by Edward Graham is published by Princeton University Press.
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