In What Is an Eclipse?, Isaac Asimov explains the fascinating game of cosmic hide-and-seek played by our planet with the Sun and Moon, and how this game appears to us here on Earth.

For general information on the “Ask Isaac Asimov” series, see What Is a Shooting Star?

This is a surprisingly disappointing book. Eclipses are pretty dramatic things, and Asimov has shown the ability to treat them dramatically, even when writing to children, and yet here he fails to do so. Perhaps one reason is that, for a heavily illustrated book on eclipses, there are surprisingly few illustrations of eclipses: only two, in fact, one solar and one lunar. What were the good people at Gareth-Stevens thinking?

In the end, then, this is a book which I would not reach to on my shelf to give a child who wanted to know about eclipses.