The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds

By Gavin Pretor-Pinney ($20.00, paperback, available to order online here or call the store, 505-988-4226)

Review by David Berkeley (author, 140 Goats and a Guitar)

On tour last month in England, I performed in a several-century-old town hall in a little village in Northumberland that doubled and tripled as the community post office and lending library. One title caught my eye, and the promoter gave it to me in exchange for one of my albums (something I haven't yet tried at Collected Works). I read the first chapter of Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s The Cloudspotter’s Guide backstage and finished it in various green rooms for the rest of the tour.  It was a great travel companion, particularly under the often cloudy skies of northern England. But it has proven even more rewarding now that I am back in Santa Fe where the sky goes on seemingly forever, Cumulus clouds stand out in great relief against the deep blue, and when we’re lucky, Nimbostratus can be seen streaking rain down over the Jemez or Cumulonimbus develop over the Sangre de Cristos promising afternoon thunderstorms.

The book is popular in England, but I haven’t seen it on many shelves in America. Though it might be classified as a kind of manual or handbook for daytime skygazing, with quick facts and charts helpful for identifying types of clouds and learning their properties, it is full of narrative asides and British humo(u)r, making it read at times like a memoir describing the development of the author's cloud love. Most enjoyably, though, Pretor-Pinney’s work is full of mind-boggling facts about all sorts of cloud features, and super interesting information about how they form, why they float, what makes them turn colors at dusk and dawn, which produce rain and why. “It is somewhat alarming,” he writes, “to learn that eighty elephants weigh about as much as the water droplets in a medium-sized Cumulus – a Cumulus mediocris – would if you added them all together. For, though the droplets in a Cumulus cloud are extremely small, there are one hell of a lot of them.” This is perhaps a strange summer reading suggestion, since it is far more scientific than sexy, but I haven’t looked at clouds the same since reading this fascinating book, and neither have my kids, despite being tired of hearing me quote from its pages.