This is probably a lovely coffee-table book, but it has two super-irritating things.

It talks a lot about all kinds of interesting things, things that you almost have to see in order to understand, and then decided to illustrate them with an annoying undetailed sketch. Flags of cities in the US? You get one badly redrawn thing, which I'm sure is supposed to be clever and consistent, but it's consistently irritating. There are lots of things described here that I'd love to peer at and think about, but instead some annoying illustrator has just dashed off a quick, stylised drawing of it.

The second thing is the length of each segment. If you've ever listened to the podcast, you'll know that it's a long, 30-minute meander through all kinds of detail about one particular element of this book. So, yes, there's a 30-minute exploration of flags of cities in the US, curiously none the worse for not being able to see any of them. We learn all kinds of fascinating details of each subject. But this book appears to skim through a barely-detailed summary of what you need to know; none of that interesting detail, no real data or information about anything in particular, and the chapters are so short, before you are quite expecting it, they end just like this review has