This report is undoubtedly a welcome handbook for mariners and those concerned with International shipping. But there is much in the pages to hold the interest of the layman. The introduction especially. dealing with "The Energy of Typhoons," is free from technical details, beginning in a disarming manner with a few stanzas from a poem and ending with a computation—of all things—the cost of running" a typhoon, The destructive force of cyclones is vividly described on the very first page:
I press on and roar while towns and cities fall As my garments swing in the fatal ring 1 destroy them one and all In Terms of Coal And as for the cost of running a typhoon, Father Gherzi introduces the work of Mr. Jobo Serge Groodin who has calculated the amount of energy liberated by a typhoon (September 13-16, 1928) in terms of actual power and fuel consumption, After much painstaking work and patience, Mr. Groodin finally finds that the power generated by this particular typhoon would be equivalent to that supplied by CN$144,221,107,250 worth of coal, the price of coal being taken as $275 per metric ton. To the average reader, this calculation may seem to be just a mathematical novelty, but in the words of Father Gherzi, the computation was a "useful meteorological task."
"Typhoons in 1939 and 1940", is profusely illustrated with charts and tables, and though parts of the book may be too abstruse for the layman, the diagrams give a graphic idea of the tracks of typhoons and lines of continental depressions, Owing to the war conditions, Father Gherzi has been handicapped by the decrease in the number of ships' log at his disposal but, nevertheless, he has produced what is probably the most comprehensive survey of its nature in the Far East.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.