pdotb reviewed The Atlas of Disappearing Places by Christina Conklin
Unfortunately rather mixed
3 stars
The good: - It's quite an attractive book. - The science sections felt pretty solid, and I felt like I learned about different aspects of human-caused ocean change. - The twenty locations featured cover a reasonable variety of places, though probably still overly biased towards richer cities (e.g., London, Hamburg, San Francisco, etc.) The bad: - It's a curious mixture of science and art, with the result that a fairly large proportion of the illustrations are rather impressionistic -- think watercolours on seaweed -- which makes them hard to read. - Each chapter concludes with a two-page "A View From 2050". Maybe I'm just a bit jaundiced, but these felt overly optimistic, plus the 'fantasy' element of them left me wondering whether the events they described before the publication date had actually happened. - The concluding "What's Next" chapter also felt rather out of place, advocating '...carrying a reusable water …
The good: - It's quite an attractive book. - The science sections felt pretty solid, and I felt like I learned about different aspects of human-caused ocean change. - The twenty locations featured cover a reasonable variety of places, though probably still overly biased towards richer cities (e.g., London, Hamburg, San Francisco, etc.) The bad: - It's a curious mixture of science and art, with the result that a fairly large proportion of the illustrations are rather impressionistic -- think watercolours on seaweed -- which makes them hard to read. - Each chapter concludes with a two-page "A View From 2050". Maybe I'm just a bit jaundiced, but these felt overly optimistic, plus the 'fantasy' element of them left me wondering whether the events they described before the publication date had actually happened. - The concluding "What's Next" chapter also felt rather out of place, advocating '...carrying a reusable water bottle...', for example. In all, I'd be hard pushed to recommend this book. I skimmed back through it while writing this review and thought that there's actually quite a good book in here, if the 'view from 2050' sections were stripped out and, I'm sorry to have to say, the impressionistic art was replaced with clearer illustrations. As it is, though...