WORLD ATLAS OF NATIONS<i> by Rand McNally Editorial and Cartographic Staff (Rand McNally & Co.: $34.95) </i>

This is a quirky, enjoyable, armchair voyage passing, with the good Rand McNally name, as a comprehensive atlas. It’s not the guide to buy if you want a single cartographic reference book for your shelves, but it offers beautifully reproduced photos of exotic places, from an Iraqi landscape of gray-green lagoons dotted with man-made islands (the photo looks like a well-cultured Petri dish) to a photo of Hong Kong in profile at night (rows of pink lights glimmering from toy-size silver buildings). Entries on individual nations are elegantly designed, with brief essays on history, economy and people.

These essays, unfortunately, do not always reflect the importance of their subjects. The text on such tiny colonies such as Pitcairn Island (population 70) is longer than that on Peru or Finland, for instance, while the text on the small island nation of Tuvalu (population 8,000) is longer than the text on Great Britain (population 56 million).

All of this might work in an offbeat way if the entries on these obscure corners of the world were engaging, but while clear and politically neutral, they are dryly written, failing to capture the character of the culture. More colorful and evocative writing by journalists and authors could brighten future editions of this most unusual atlas.