Weather Wonders – Gordon Higgins ***

The weather can make for a good book of pictures, and it was interesting to compare this book with Extraordinary Weather from the same publisher. I would say that a fair number of the pictures work better here – they are brighter and more contrasty, though I have to offset the fact that many are significantly smaller in a book that is little bigger than a large postcard, so isn’t really able to offer really stunning sized photographs.

Like the other title we have a few pages of introduction and then what is essentially a set of photographs with captions. Here, though, there is a wider spread of pictures. The book is split into two sections with photos ‘from above’ and ‘from below.’ Extreme weather inevitably features, but here there is a much wider spread of reasonably ordinary weather, from fog over London to a pretty comprehensive collection of photographs of the different cloud types.

It’s all mildly interesting, but I can’t get hugely excited about either the topic or the photos. Some are certainly dramatic or colourful, but when you’ve seen 3 overhead views of storms or 5 cloudscapes, you have probably seen as many as you want to see. Like Extraordinary Weather, this is more a dip-in book than one I would expect many people to read from cover to cover. It surely has a fairly limited audience – but if you like this kind of thing, it’s not a bad example of its kind.

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Review by Martin O'Brien

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