Customer Reviews

Visualizing Physical Geography (VISUALIZING SERIES)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is a great addition to the list of Physical Geography textbooks. The images and figures are large, high quality, and really help make the material more understandable -- as was the intent! Over all, the text in the book is well written. Alan Stahler is no newcomer to textbook authoring. I have used some of his other Physical Geography texts in my classes before and found them to be just fine. For the most part, Physical Geography textbooks are all quite well written, and are very similar in content. In my experience they are almost interchangeable -- all very good, but none really outstanding, Strahler's other texts included. This book is different, and much better, because of the "visual" approach. I have one major complaint, though (which resulted in my 4-star rating): Strahler's treatment of climate zones. Why does he not follow the Koppen Climate Classification system? I treat climate zones and their associated biomes as the foundation of my class. The Koppen system is logical, understandable, and students can more easily understand how climates are classified by using temperature and precipitation variables. I like the Koppen system! Strahler disregards this system and imposes his own. Gone are the two- or three-letter disignations which, themselves, explain how each zone is classified and where (with respect to latitude) each is located. Strahler's classificaion by names only is not as useful, period. The collaboration with National Geographic, and their great images, is wonderful, and makes the textbook something great. The actual text is good, like every other physical geography textbook, but I find the Stahler approach to climate zones to be quite irritating.

I purchased this book for my Geography class, and I have found it to be very informative. The National Geographic pictures are great and really help to "visualize" the information. The text is easy to read and understand. The visuals are helpful. I really like that it gives definitions of all of the vocab words off to the side of the text so I can easily understand it. Love the pictures!

When I first received the Geograpy text book, I was surprised to see some of the corner dog-eared, even the cover. Not a big deal, I'm a just a book phanatic. Besides that, it was in good shape as promised. Thank You. Jen Ferrell

The book is in great condition. It appeared to be brand new. The service was also extremely quick. I received the book 2 days after ordering.

I don't like useless electives (i.e. not English/writing, logic/analysis, etc) that won't help you with anything you want to know or achieve in life. And this book is a book befitting for one of those classes: plenty of irrelevant details, poorly organised, uninteresting, a lot to read/a lot of unnecessary, frustrating and unintelligent work. It's also befitting of geography and environmental sciences majors/liberals/people with no mind whatsoever.