The Rock and Gem Book by Dan Green

The Rock and Gem Book Reviews

• 
  Kelsey

  This book is fantastic!!! I plan to buy our own as I can only hoard our library copy for so long.
  
  Science, history, art, geography and culture... all melded so well into this one fascinating topic. Rocks and stones? Who knew. It's a beautiful yet functional book with so much information and so much to look at. Not one to miss for a child's home bookshelf.
• 
  Danielle

  We read every word on every page. Every single word!
• 
  jacky

  We read it for the photographs. I spent most of the book reading the names of things to the kids and listening to them pick their favorites on each page.
• 
  Pop Bop

  Deeply Weird, but Sort of Fun
  
  Look closely at this book's subtitle, (at least in the U.S. edition): "A Visual Encyclopedia of the Earth's Treasures". Two important points here - first, there is not a lot of text; second, the authors take a loopy and indiosyncratic shot at what constitutes a treasure.
  
  We start with 40 pages of rocks and their various classifications, and that is quite good and generally up to date and informative. Then we move on to minerals. The pictures are gorgeous, although the descriptions of the minerals are very dense and technical. Of most interest are observations about the uses to which the minerals are usually put. From minerals we drift into the topic of gems, and the distinction between "raw" and cut gems is made starkly clear.
  
  But then, without much of a hint about this from the title or the cover, we move into the world of fossils. This might be the best part of the book since the photos are excellent, the information is current, and the captioning gets a bit more chatty, upbeat, and interesting. For a young reader I sometimes suspect that all mineral photos, apart from being colorful and sort of neat, begin to blend together after a few pages. But with fossils you get worlds and worlds of cool stuff. Don't know why they aren't mentioned in the title or more featured on the cover.
  
  Anyway, from there, though, we move on to a lengthy section on "shells", and we get pages and pages of cowries, clams and chitons, which I have always felt could be summed up on a one page pamphlet titled "shells". No matter, though, because once the shells begin to pale we end with "treasures". It's over a dozen pages of random treasures - a Viking silver hoard in England, a famous pearl, a royal Chinese jade burial suit, and so on.
  
  So, this is really half a dozen different picture books in one, organized loosely around the theme of cool stuff you usually find on the ground. I'm actually O.K. with that and enjoyed the book, (although it could have used a bit less "shell" and a bit more fossil), but so as not to be disappointed it seems best for one to think of this as a coffee table picture book for browsing. On that scale it scores well. (Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)
• 
  Ietrio

  There is not much science in this volume, but it is a pleasure to look at the colorful pictures.
• 
  Marmot

  Kids loved this book we got from the library. Want to get a copy as it would be a great one to have around.
• 
  Sandra

  Beautiful book, sometimes low on information and sometimes oddly specific. It's like wandering through a cabinet of curiosities. (Besides rocks and gems it also has fossils, shells, and famous treasures.)