Wow! Earth

Review also includes:

Wow! Animal, Richard Walker, 978-1405341585

These two Big Boppers from DK promise to tell us ‘lots of amazing things’ about their two subjects. And I should think so too – what else would we expect from a publisher with millions of images and thousands of designers, editors and ‘creative retouchers’ (yes, honestly!) at its disposal.

And they don’t disappoint. Each volume is stuffed with definitely amazing examples from each rich pageant. All kinds of ‘art’ devices are used to provide illustrations to facts assembled in a far from conventional order. So we can jump from a collared poison frog apparently sitting with a toy kangaroo on a baby’s cot to a thermos flask full of geese. Creative retouching? Probably. Earth provides excellent examples of – always dramatic – geological phenomena from granite batholiths to the Uplift Canyon (anyone remember that ’50s hit ‘Suddenly there’s a valley’?).

There are capable glossaries, indices and detectably logical presentation for those who want them, but these two are much more about dropping in and seeing what you find – amusement arcades for the sofa.