Merlin P. Lawson

Every state needs a book such as this, and it does a good job of demonstrating through maps the essentials of Nebraska climate. A very nice innovation is the inclusion of a county-gridded template to overlay on the maps (well, some of them...) to localize the information. The book's main shortcoming is the frequent illegibility of the maps, particularly the thermobars, as the miniscule numerical designations are strictly from the 20/10 line on the eye chart, and conjoined with the often-garish colors on the map, all of the information is not eye-readable. As is common with books of this type, there is also a certain amount of filler as the authors explain many things such as the hydrologic cycle and how to use weather instruments which don't have any particular nexus with the subject. And there's a groaner of a chapter delineating with great specificity the veracity of that worst of all seventies scientific fads, global cooling. This in a book which now serves in large measure as a chronicle of the global heating phenomenon--try finding, i.e., anyplace in Nebraska which experiences 15- to 25 nights below zero per winter these days.… (altro)