By Kathy Furgang
The big, photo-packed weather book for the child who's finished the little readers and now wants tornadoes, lightning, and a real storm chaser.
Sixty-four pages of full-bleed National Geographic photographs: a tornado on the ground, lightning splitting the sky, a wall of dust rolling over a town. Around the pictures are facts, quiz questions, maps, and record-breaking stats. It covers what a weather-mad child wants to know, from how clouds and storms form to the water cycle to the extremes of hurricanes, blizzards, and droughts. Running through the whole book are 'Explorer's Corner' features by Tim Samaras, a real National Geographic tornado chaser, who describes what it was actually like to drive toward the storms most people drive away from. You flip through it as much as you read it.
This is the step up from a thirty-two-page reader for a child whose weather obsession has outgrown the beginner books but who still reads for the pictures and facts more than for pages of text. Nothing here is a long haul; you can open to any spread. The photographs are the most dramatic weather images you'll find at this age, which is exactly what a storm-lover wants. And the storm-chaser thread does something a plain facts book doesn't: it puts a real person out in the weather and makes the science look like something you could go do.