Sarah Zambello (text) and Susy Zanella (illustrator), Wave Atlas: Everything you need to know about Waves, Thames & Hudson, February 2025, 80 pp., RRP $34.99 (hbk), ISBN 9781760764524
This is the second children’s atlas produced by Zambello and Zanella and translated into English. The first was their exquisite book on clouds. In this atlas readers will find everything they need to know about waves through a mix of science, culture and art.
The intriguing starting point for the atlas asks the question, how did water form on earth? And the answer is not straightforward. It’s possible much of our water came from outer space in the form of ice on meteors or within the great solar wind, but there is some evidence that traces, at least, of water were here from the very beginning of our planet’s life. This evidence has come from minerals lying in an Australian desert.
From here the atlas follows the restless movement of water through evaporation, rain, ocean currents and tidal pull, which bring us to waves. How do they arise? We learn about the ocean areas called a ‘fetch’ where the winds blow unhindered in a single direction for thousands of kilometres, causing what we see on the shore as waves. And of course, as with clouds, there are many types and species of waves. And many ways of measuring waves.
Along the way we are pointed to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Hugo Pratt’s Ballad of the Salty Sea. Zanella’s dramatic artwork dominates every page, sometimes with photographic realism, sometimes more imagined but always with the colours of the sea.
There is so much to look at, read about and think about on each page that this book could not be read-through in one sitting. It is a book to return to over and over again, learning a little more each time and gradually coming to appreciate the long history of love and curiosity humanity has had with the sea.
The production and design are handsome, professional, and irresistible.
Reviewed by Kevin Brophy
