Volcanoes:  "This third edition of Volcanoes published by Freeman, written by the husband and wife team Decker and Decker, provides healthy competition for the others...Examples and descriptions of real eruptions are used to illustrate the processes of volcanic eruptions. These are presented at a level readable by the interested lay person but in sufficient depth to be useful for the student of volcanology... It's a worthy addition to the volcanologist's bookshelf either at home or in the office."

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A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals:  This Field Guide has been, and still is, The classic and useful Field Guide. Despite its title, this is mainly oriented toward minerals. Well organized and interestingly written, this is one of the few mineralogy texts which is both readable for enjoyment, and useful to both the beginner and the expert.

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Storm Chaser is a marvelous book about the awesome beauty of atmospheric violence, the people who seek it, and the stunning photographs captured of our turbulent atmosphere at its most dramatic. Warren Faidley is one of the best weather photographers ever. He makes his living running after and photographing tornadoes, hurricanes, and lightning. His life as a storm chaser was an inspiration for the movie Twister and for Bruce Sterling's novel Heavy Weather. Storm Chaser is full of Faidley's most gorgeous and terrifying pictures--particularly the double-page spread of a wall cloud with a tornado emerging like the finger of God. Faidley's text combines understandable explanations of how tornadoes form, an especially useful and complete glossary of weather terms and slang, an autobiographical account of how he became a storm chaser, and logs of some of his most interesting, dramatic, or amusing chases. He's honest about the marginal sanity of his pursuit; about the near-toxic food and lodging, with "mattresses ranging from wet-sponge status to petrified"; and about the drive toward danger: "It has left me standing at the doorstep of disaster, humbled by the cold and violent reality of the nature of my pursuit of nature." --Mary Ellen Curtin

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A Field Guide to Geology : Eastern North America (Peterson Field Guides) - A unique guide to land formation offers vivid maps, photographs, and cross-sections showing the distinct field marks of the different formations in each geologic region of eastern North America, explaining how to read and understand geologic history.

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Annals of the Former World: In 1978 New Yorker magazine staff writer John McPhee set out making notes for an ambitious project: a geological history of North America, centered, for the sake of convenience, on the 40th parallel, a history that encompasses billions of years. In 1981 he published the first of the four books that would come from his research: Basin and Range, a study of the mountainous lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. Two years later came In Suspect Terrain, a grand overview of the Appalachian mountain system. In 1986 McPhee released Rising from the Plains, a history of the Rocky Mountains set largely in Wyoming. And in 1993 came Assembling California, a survey of the area geologists find to be a laboratory of volcanic and tectonic processes, a place where geology can be watched in the making. Annals of the Former World gathers these four volumes, which McPhee always conceived of as a whole, to make that epic of the Earth's formation; to it he adds a fifth book, Crossing the Craton, which introduces the continent's ancient core, underlying what is now Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.

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The Age of the Earth:  Dalrymple explains the evidence and logic that have led scientists to conclude that the Earth is four and one-half billion years old. Topics include the history of the universe, long lived radioactive isotopes, the oldest rocks, solar system evidence, and the age of the Milky Way. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

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