Small Blue Planet: The Real Picture World Atlas

Elegant and sometimes hauntingly beautiful, Small Blue Planet: The Real Picture World Atlas, alas, could stand to be a little more useful. The disc provides four ways of looking at the Earth: a relief map, a Chronosphere to track night and day, a mosaic of satellite photos, and a political map. The last is the weakest, with handy information on each country linked to cutesy sound files (hear ''good morning'' in 75 languages) and a map with less detail than the ones hanging over the chalkboard back in homeroom. The satellite photos, however, exert a raw, discombobulating power as they depict Antarctic ice sheets, downtown Paris, and Niagara Falls. B