Customer Reviews

The Essential Atlas of Fossils and Minerals

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I was excited to find this book at my local library. I found it in the adult section. Yet At first blush, it seemed brief enough to recommend to the children's department; it seemed to have a really nice organizational format going for it until I actually read the book. Now I can only recommend this book to the remainder bin, but ideally it should be recalled. There is one glaring error where rubellite was illustrated with a blue gem. As the name suggests rubellite tourmaline is red!

Further, the illustrations are inconsistent. Most show a specimen of the mineral or gem in question, but there are pictures of a book and a knife, to name two examples, showing the use of the mineral instead of a shot of the specimen itself. This usage approach would have been excellent for a juvenile book, but only as an adjunct to the actual specimens being represented. And there was one photo that was so inscrutable, that I could not make out what was being shown at all; it appeared to be a closeup of a jeweler's bench doing something with a torch. No explanation was given.

There was an inconsistency in the Gunning-Fogg level of the vocabulary. Some terms were defined in the text, while others went begging for explanation, and there is no glossary-points off for any non-fiction book using a specialized vocabulary that does not have a glossary. Thus, this book seems to have suffered from a rush to print without considering the age or expertise of the reader it was aiming to reach.

If I could give it zero stars, I would.

A book to give that extra introduction of these important special subjects of geology. Pupils at school, first-year students at university and anyone interested in geology will find this a useful book about the world on which we live and its crust.