Simply Beautiful is a fitting title for this collection of stunning photographs taken from the National Geographic`s renowned Image Collection. Simply Beautiful takes readers on a remarkable visual journey through some of the most astonishing photographs to be found in National Geographic archive. Award-winning photographer Annie Griffiths chose the images to reflect variations on the theme of beauty and organized chapters around these aesthetic concepts, introducing each with brief essays about the featured concept, such as Light, Composition, Moment (Gesture and Emotion), Motion, Palette, and Wonder, and lyrical quotations from poets and scholars. Unusually for a photographic book of this kind, many of the photographs seen in this book can be purchased as prints and information on how to order is included alongside the credits. A picture paints a thousand words, and author intelligently allows the wondrous photographs here to do most of the talking beyond the introduction and short essays. She does, however, enhance and illuminate the visual delight on offer here, with quotations from writers ranging from Leonard Cohen to Andre Bazin. In the words of the latter, quoted on the theme of Wonder: `If I had influence with the good fairy...I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life. This thought is juxtaposed with an exquisite vision in white, a frame filled with the snowy-pure dots and rays of a bird`s fan tail. And on it goes, picture after tantalising picture, alive with wondrous beauty`. This collection does as much as anything could to inculcate the sense of wonder wished for by Bazin. This is a book you must open for yourself, and bask in its radiant beauty.