SEYMOUR SIMON’S BOOK OF TRAINS

Young trainiacs rejoice! The inimitable author of Seymour Simon’s Book of Trucks (2000) offers a companion volume featuring the same sort of huge, bright, sharply focused color photos paired to succinct descriptive and historical commentary. Sandwiched between an attention-grabbing gallery of locomotive headshots and elevated closing views of a pair of crowded rail yards lit by a low sun, the author introduces rolling stock, past and present—from quaint cog railways to state-of-the-art bullet trains, plus an array of freight and tank cars. Simon continues to irritate lazy readers by refusing to caption his pictures; instead, he alludes to them in the accompanying text, adding anecdotes, detail, and background information in typically calm, orderly prose. Detail-lovers might wish to know just which trains they are seeing, and a bibliography or list of Web sites at the end would not have been amiss—but big machinery has never looked better. (Nonfiction. 7-9)