World of Geology: Travels to rocky places provides a photographic journey, capturing some spectacular and fascinating features of world geology, compiled over several decades and covering six of the seven continents (i.e. excluding Antarctica).

The 110 sites forming the portfolio of photographs selected for the book are influenced by the authors professional background and experience; with applied geology in the context of civil engineering and mining well represented, as is karst together with the more familiar topics of glaciation, volcanism and geysers, as well as the more unusual, including an outside display of meteorites in the city of Windhoek, Namibia. Many of the photographs have been used over the years by the author in geology lectures to students and geological-themed lectures, in addition to some having appeared on the back cover of the magazine Geology Today, accompanied by some explanatory text, and now shared with a wider audience in this publication.

Each photograph is usefully accompanied by informative text displayed on the facing page. The book contains a useful concise and clear introduction covering the relationship between geology and landscape and how the geological processes relate to plate tectonics, complemented by a useful colour diagram capturing all the major geological processes related to convergent and divergent plate boundaries. A simplified colour world map is provided with numerically annotated red dots identifying the general locations of the 110 photographs on a global scale.

The continental distribution of the photographic localities is around 77% from North America, Europe and Asia, with the remaining 23% drawn from South America, Australia/New Zealand and Africa. Approximately half of the European sites are from the UK and Ireland.

Some of the photographs demonstrate the impact of geology on the environment and the vulnerability of humans, buildings and infrastructure to the geological forces of nature, whether associated with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, landslides or subsidence, the latter two processes increasingly influenced by anthropogenic activity and also climate change impact.

This collection makes an ideal coffee table book, to be periodically picked up and read rather than cover to cover in one sitting. It is competitively priced and will appeal both to geologists and non-geologists alike with an interest in some of the fascinating features of world geology.