Encyclopedic World Atlas

Rating:
Summary: Excellent pictures & Concise description
Review: A+ 16K big book. Worth every cent spent.I think every scholoar who is global-minded should have one. I like this atlas so much that I sent this as a gift to my college professors who love it very very much. Every-one will love it and after learning from this book you'll no longer feel surprised to some unknown countries/cities and you'll have a cultural/ historical/geographical perspective toward analyzing some happenings.

Rating:
Summary: A Regretfully Poor Revision
Review: After owning a number of atlases and eventually giving them all away, I happened upon a second edition of the Oxford Encyclopedic World Atlas. It was nothing short of perfect. It had compiled comparative world data, organized in an informative way and treated each country with a wonderful summary. It was useful and beautiful.

Therefore when the fifth edition was announced I placed my order. Rarely have I've been so disappointed when expectation sees reality.

First of all, the wonderful global comparisons of oceans, climate, wealth, energy etc., have been replaced with common continental summaries. Worse though is the fact that these summaries consist only of those incomprehensible theme maps of temperature, precipitation, vegetation and land use. It was because all the rest of the atlases had these useless enigmatic diagrams that I gave them away. I defy anyone to dig any useful information off a January Temperature map. I rather suspect that this information is more readily available and cheaper to obtain making the publication more cost effective for OUP. That it becomes more useless to the reader by the same turn doesn't seem to matter.

The country summaries have been ordered a-z as opposed by continent. This certainly makes it easier to find them but renders them out of any context whatsoever. But even here the work is substandard. For instance in the summary of Argentina, the section on the Economy ends with "...which are heavily" One wonders - heavily what? Sloppy.

Why UOP would take such a solid franchise and ruin it through conscience manipulation and sloppy design and editing is beyond me.

For the killing of truly useful tome OUP should not receive even one star, but I will give it two. The first is for the editions that bravely preceded this one. And the second is for my hope for the sixth edition. In the meantime I strongly recommend that the staff at OUP convene at the pub for it is apparent that their office decisions regarding the Oxford Encyclopedic World Atlas are abysmal.

Rating:
Summary: This Book
Review: It has very easy-to-read and concise maps. Also, it has very detailed information for each country's history, geography, and government. Very nice description, and overall a great book!

Rating:
Summary: I love this atlas!
Review: It's so easy to use and great for my daughter's book reports. Well worth the money. I think the other reviewer who doesn't like the revision is mistaken.