Deserts are beautiful places, even when unforgiving of those who do not respect their nature. This is an attractive book, written for the nonspecialist, that portrays that nature with a wealth of simple maps, lovely photographs, and considerable basic introductory information. Topical chapters, each dealing with some general characteristic such as physical geography, plants, or animals, are interspersed with atlas sections on the deserts of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia and the Poles (the arid "cold deserts" of the Arctic and Antartica). Each major desert area is described by a location map, a larger desert map, a sentence or two about specific areas identified on the map, a fact file, and illustrations of some unique attributes. The deserts are not always easy to find on the small location maps.

This is both a browsing book and beginning reference book for the topics included. For the most part, the information and layout of the book are handsomely integrated. Many of the numerous sidebars include illustrations, but there are several (for example, the one describing the moloch in the chapter "Creatures of the Desert") that would have benefited from accompanying photographs