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I have always enjoyed maps, atlases and geography, above and beyond the little I got in school. The National Geographic Atlas was the successor to my dated (and beat-up) 1985 copy of the Hammond Citation Atlas, which I spent long hours looking over in the days when there was still a Soviet Union. I am glad to have something so current that it even shows the splitting of the Canadian NWT to create the new territory of Nunavut in 1999. The satellite imagery is certainly a good summary of overall surface detail, something that no "physical" map will provide, but most of what there is to read is in the selection of principally political maps. National Geographic has taken the approach of presenting "chunks" of landmass roughly chosen to include certain countries, states or regions, and one often finds a given division shown on numerous maps at numerous scales--European countries, for example, might appear in their own maps, in maps of Europe, and at the edge of a map of Asia. In this regard, the cartographers do well to keep all the details at the peripheral areas that are shown for the ones the map is "supposed to" depict. This serves to create a continuity that draws one's attention from place to place, which is how the one earth really exists, after all. Most notably missing from this Atlas is topographic indications, though the shading of relief and numerous elevations allow a person to perceive the general lay of the land. Being American, I naturally have a bit of trouble with the use of metric measurements for altitudes and soundings, but after reading off enough peaks I was already familiar with, I formed a usable enough reference frame in my mind. One feature of the Hammond Citation that is missing from this otherwise more extensive atlas is the coupling of thematic and political maps. I had grown accustomed to having land use and mineral information in the context of the more detailed maps. The National Geographic Seventh Edition presents all of the thematic maps for the entire world in the opening section, making a person flip back and forth. Another difficulty I'm still adjusting to is the sheer size of this book. I find myself needing to stretch a fair distance beyond my typical range to get from a position at the bottom of the page to detail at the top. All in all, however, this Atlas contains a wealth of well-thought-out and consistently presented data on the entire earth. It is sure to be something I'll use for quite some time, as I continue to feed my appetite for facts, big and small, about our terrestrial home.