The Book of Clouds

Product Information

Book of Clouds" soars and shimmers through its assured writing, whimsical observations and its sheer ease. When she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive historian Doktor Weiss, her life in Berlin becomes more complex—and more perilous. This is an 80-page cloud spotting guide that you can use to help you understand weather patterns and cloud formations.

At the end of the book, she hallucinates a dense fog that loosens locks throughout Berlin and causes posters to slip down from the walls.Overall: beautiful, dreamy writing, lots of solitary musing and a good sense of the city of Berlin and its history. This book is much more than a scientific guide to the weather, it is inspiring, humorous and philosophical too. The author’s style is witty and eclectic and the book features beautiful photographs in addition to some line drawings that highlight some classical paintings and even lava lamps. You understand the history of it all (like why it came about) and all of the challenges that have arisen when it comes to naming these ever-changing forms in the sky. watching as the rain washed the dirt from car windows, promises from fulfillment, and a small bird from a nest.

Some books really focus on educating you about cloud formations and also how they relate to the weather while other books give you a sense of reprieve from day-to-day life within four walls. If you have a curious kiddo between ages three and seven who is excited by clouds, Explore My World Clouds by Marfe Ferguson Delano is the best book for them. Needless to say, it would be most foolish of any pilot not to fully understand the implication of the different types of clouds whilst on the ground, before a flight, as well as whilst in the air. With a book like this, you bring a little bit of the vastness of the universe into your home for their little minds to comprehend.

The descriptions of the clouds are expressive and imaginative, one of my favorites is the "cloud haircut" Pileus cloud, a "supercooled droplet bouffant, worn exclusively by the fashionable Cumulus family". Sometimes she feels alienated from the city, sometimes cautiously assimilated, but always the weight of history presses in- as when she tours the infamous subterranean "Gestapo bowling alley", part psychic horror, part tourist trap ("Nazi, Stasi, what's the difference," shrugs the guide), or loses her bearings among the concrete slabs of the Holocaust memorial; or investigates ghostly noises coming from the empty apartment upstairs.

There are books that break down all the different types of cloud formations, helping you learn the language of the sky. But to get an idea of how the weather will develop for the precise spot where you’re standing (or walking, sailing, golfing, fishing, etc) you don’t need any equipment or a wifi connection – you just need to look up. As an adult, you know that life is filled with lots of peaks and valleys and that sometimes you need a little bit of inspiration. For several years now, this woman in her 20s has been living in Berlin, having minimal contact with her family, getting by on low-paying jobs and seeing almost no one. There’s the upstairs part of her building, where nobody seems to live but from which strange noises appear.From the massive, anonymous housing blocks of the former East Berlin, to the late-night and often literally underground “parties” held in abandoned buildings, to the centrally located Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (which she experiences as eerily disorienting on a shadowy, moonlit night), Tatiana’s Berlin is exactly the one you will find if you go there. The book has only a handful of sentences on the left side of each spread, with a giant photo on the right. She works for a retired, infirm historian, for whom she transcribes his thoughts on ”the phenomenology of space, especially in Berlin. A popular anthology of uplifting prose and poetry compiled exclusively for Rainbow Trust by Lady Glover.