Essential World Atlas

Rating:
Summary: A decent reference for a very reasonable price
Review: I ordered this book as a Christmas gift for grandparents, and they have loved it. It has enough information and detail to look up places you read about in books or hear about on TV, etc. If you want an extremely detailed heavy-duty reference, this may not be your best choice. However, if all you want is a nice sized, decent altas, this works.

The first part has great detail on the US and the second half details the world. One nice feature is that in the upper corner of the maps you see a tiny map with a sligthly larger view-point with page numbers. So, if you're looking at the far right side of the page and getting to the end of the map, this tiny map tells you on what page the map "continues", if you will.

My only gripe about this atlas is that it is bound as a regular book and thus it is hard to read things that are in the middle crack. It would be much nicer if the book were bound with a spiral or had margins on the inside so that the crack of the book didn't hide things.