By Susanna Van Rose
One fat photographic reference that covers volcanoes and earthquakes together, since they come from the same cause, and trusts an eight-to-twelve-year-old with the actual science.
Seventy-two pages of the standard DK Eyewitness setup: real objects photographed against white, cutaway diagrams, and short captions all around them. This one runs both subjects together, which makes sense, since volcanoes and earthquakes come from the same churning inside the Earth. You get what the planet is actually made of under the crust, the different shapes a volcano can take and why the shape predicts how it will erupt, and real rock, ash, and pumice shot like museum specimens. Then the earthquake half: faults, seismic waves, seismographs, tsunamis, and how engineers build something that can ride out a shaking. The famous disasters are all here too, Vesuvius, Krakatoa, Mount St. Helens, San Francisco, with the objects and photographs to match. There's no story and no order to it. You open to any page and something is going on.
This is the one to reach for after a child has worn out the starter books and wants more, and it's the one that keeps going. The browse-anywhere format suits an obsession well, because there's no front-to-back to finish, so a child can graze the same book for two years and keep turning up pages they'd skipped before. It's also the only book on this subject that sets volcanoes and earthquakes side by side and shows why they belong together, which is a question a curious child gets to eventually. And don't let the eight-and-up label stop you if yours is younger. A six-year-old who's deep in this can live on the photographs and captions for now, and the paragraphs will still be there when they're wanted.