Dry Climates (The World's Climates)

From School Library Journal Gr 4-6--Visually attractive packages with easy-to-read print, abundant full-color photographs, and serious flaws. Each topic is presented in a double-page spread providing readers with explanations of weather patterns, ocean currents, plant and animal desert life, and how our environment is changing. Dry Climates details the differences between arid and semiarid regions and includes a description of the North American prairie. At least one of the graphs is labeled incorrectly, mixing up temperature and precipitation, leaving readers mighty puzzled. Two photographs have the wrong captions. These errors severely impair the book's effectiveness for young fact-finders. All three titles have an even more fundamental problem: these surveys of the world's climates are chock-full of geographical references and yet all rely on the same outline map of the world that does not identify the continents, much less the countries and regions under discussion. Students will be better served by Miranda MacQuitty's Desert (Knopf, 1994) and Sheri Amsel's Deserts (Raintree/Steck-Vaughn, 1992).