Erosion and Weathering

This is an expensive translation from the Dutch, in a series which covers a number of natural phenomena. It is a dense, continuous text and the author (and his translator) have made no concessions to a younger audience. Much of the information is repeated, in precis, as captions to the beautiful (as in National Geographic) colour photographs but even here the language has as many strange shapes as the landscape it describes: 'The result of this is the occurrence of characteristic, vertical shrinkage, jointing.' Many of the processes described here might have been illuminated by diagrams. It could all have been more simply and succinctly put. There is no impression of the topic being treated as a whole. The book ends abruptly with a very short chapter on caves and a sentence about stalagmites and stalactites. Although there are subheadings to give some guidance as to where you are in the text, there is no index. Anyone below the age of 14 will find it impenetrable. Anyone else may well find it dull and long winded.