Impulse buying

As next month’s holiday involves volcanoes, I could hardly pass by* The Volcano Adventure Guide, which is a what it says on the tin guide for people for whom watching Horizon isn’t enough and who want to visit an active volcano. It looks a very good mix of logistics, including rules for surviving eruptions, travel guide, and science. It's the sort of thing that really ought to have been a Christmas or birthday present, but as I shall be going to some of the volcanoes in question rather sooner than December, it seemed daft not to go for it now. My one niggle is that the twenty volcanoes described in detail (plus shorter descriptions of other local volcanoes and phenomena) appear to be rather USA-centric. To some extent this may reasonably reflect the author’s expertise and experience, as she is based at a US university, and including reasonably accessible among her criteria (which also include geologically active) seems appropriate in a book of this type. But to limit them entirely to North America (including Costa Rica, the West Indies, and Hawaii) and western Europe seems excessive. I agree that Mount Erebus is not really practical, likewise Kamchatka. Africa and Indonesia present challenges to tourism of this type that the developed world doesn’t, though both have volcano tourism. But nothing at all from Japan or New Zealand, or even South America? Of course, it is possible I am biased by a strong disinclination to subject myself to US immigration at the moment, but I feel the book loses something thereby. But at least I can use the rest of the information to plan my own trips one day.

Volume two is The First Teenagers: the lifestyle of young wage-earners in interwar Britain, which was in the window in Oxfam, has a cover photograph of two swimming-costume-clad girls smoking, and, oh bliss, is not about Bright Young Things, but largely working class and lower middle-class boys and girls.

*In fact I didn’t. I read about it online and then went to Blackwells and found a copy.