Rather out of date now, unfortunately; author Craig Bohren keeps suggesting experiments using a slide projector to provide a tight light beam. Nevertheless a clever amateur scientist could probably cobble something together to perform most of them. Clouds in a Glass of Beer provides explanations for many of the puzzling problems of everyday physics, such as “Why is the head on a glass of beer white when the beer itself is yellow?” and debunks many popular misconceptions about weather and the atmosphere. (For example, a cloudy night is not warmer than a clear one because “the clouds reflect infrared radiation from the earth”; it’s warmer because the clouds themselves are warm – i.e., they are emitting infrared rather than reflecting it). I confess a long-held misconception of my own was debunked; I had read somewhere that you can never see more than two rainbows because higher order reflections are directed toward the ground. In fact, there are reliable observations of third-order rainbows, but the third-order rainbow is behind the viewer when looking at first- and second-order rainbows and is usually lost in the sun’s glare. I’ll have to start checking. ( )

This is a terrible book with an attractive title. It i a collection of inexpensive experiments to teach atmospheric physics 1.01. The author was happy to publish his lectures notes: that can certainly be useful to another teacher, but it does not make a book. For instance, the book is made of a series of experiments: it is not organized by concepts and the concepts are not explained. It is not a book. You can find hundreds of such experiments for free on the internet, many of them on Youtube. ( )