Eye-catching color photographs are the centerpieces of the books. While striking, many of the pictures are composite images, in which several planets are combined in the same photograph with little regard to accurate scale or position. The text, interspersed among the pictures on half-sized pages, overuses italics and exclamation points to convey the wonders of the solar system. Ind.

Gr 2-4--The interleaved text pages of this unnamed series' earlier entries (see George's The Sun [Child's World, 1992]) have given way to a more conventional format, but as introductions to the solar system, the books are still unexceptional. The full-page graphics do catch the eye, with sharp full-color photos of the surface of Mars, seen both from ground level and high overhead, the dramatic swirls of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, and the clean arc of great rings around Saturn imparting a clear sense of each planet's beauty and mystery. Nonetheless, several are evidently composite photos or artists' conceptions--unlabeled as such--and some close-ups are just abstract blurs of color or shadow. The text, printed on facing pages, is cast along the same lines in all three volumes, opening with an account of early terrestrial observations, then using information gathered by unmanned space probes to describe briefly each planet's major physical features and satellites. Unfortunately, vague, simplistic statements and outright errors are all too easy to find: the Galileo spacecraft reached Jupiter "not very long ago" (Jupiter), "Mars is usually about 50 million miles from Earth" (Mars), and that planet's Olympus Mons is not 6 miles high, as claimed, but more than 17. Seymour Simon's book on these planets (all Morrow) and Elaine Landau's (all Watts) are somewhat longer, not to mention older, but have aged reasonably well, and combine comparable illustrations with more reliable information.--John Peters, New York Public Library