Clouds: A Memoir

Product Information

You’ll discover those really soft, cotton-like cumulus clouds and some really scary yet intriguing whirling funnels.

Laura Sobiech has lovingly written her son Zach's memoir, Clouds, after losing him in an agonizing battle with cancer.

Exhibits of cloud images captured on film by John Day have been and/or are on exhibit in a number of public galleries including the Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, Californa, and The Hong Kong Science Museum. The text in this book isn’t very engaging (“just the facts, ma’am”), but I like that it has a single full page photo on the left and just a few sentences on the right of each double page spread.

Even though the material is scientific, this book follows a logical progression that makes the information easy to understand. Readers will be stunned by the infinite variety of colours and shapes; some familiar with names such as the Eagle Nebula, the Pillars of Hercules, and the North America Nebula, and others, more obscure, referred to as the Tadpoles, the Helmet of Thor and the Mouldy Strawberry Nebulae.It enters more of a philosophical arena, where you can learn different lessons that can help you feel more inspired and more engaged with your life. He tells her yet another fantastical story, and it’s only when tragedy strikes that Tabby wonders … could Grandad’s impossible tale be true? Eicher’s text is supported by explosive visuals of these clouds of dust and gas spanning unimaginable distances, brought to life in cutting edge 3-D for the first time in the history of astronomy. I can't imagine writing about the death of my beloved child and the story does jump around a bit but the message is important and kudos to Laura Sobiech for sharing her heart and bringing Zach's voice and legacy to light.

You learn a couple of different things like how to identify each type of cloud, the different processes at work that produce them, the significance each of these clouds has for the weather, and some of the optical phenomena that are produced by certain types of clouds. They’re usually also filled with lots of facts that are explained in a very friendly way so that kids can pick up on them without feeling too overwhelmed. I am not sure that I have laughed and cried at the same time before but I was definitely tearing up and then laughing the next paragraph. Several reviewers reported that they were disappointed by the content, including one who said, “I was expecting much more factual information including types of clouds. In Gallery of Clouds, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: “The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color.This is what Laura Sobiech prayed when she found out her seventeen-year-old son had only one year to live. Like Tatiana, an entirely refreshing portrait of young womanhood, it is unselfconscious, uncompromising, wholly authentic: a fraying mass of narrative loose ends, it is also somehow satisfying in its open-endedness. I would definitely recommend this book to others if you want to seek something to motivate you to keep on moving on with your life. In this definitive guide to the clouds and the skies, Richard Hamblyn introduces you to all the different cloud species.