Pacific

I love it. I was interrested 'til the end. I couldn't stop reading. Kay D. Rizzo is a great christian romance novelist. I will always cherish these books.

This book is a must for anyone who lives or spends any amount of time in San Francisco. Locals and visitors alike will find it indespensible if they love to eat out but don't always want to do it on a champagne budget. This book reveals not only where the great food is in the City by the Bay (and surrounding areas,) but also addresses the pocketbook, too. It's based on the premise that the meals must not come to more than a [certain amount of money.] It covers the gamut from fine dining to taquerias to everything in between. I find the reviews to be comprehensive, realistic and often mirror exactly my impression of the dining establishment. (So it MUST be good!) ;^) The index is divided by both neighborhood and food type and is very easy to use, as the restaurants are then listed alphabetically. I keep mine in the car so that it's always easily available. I use it often. I'm also buying 10 of them as Christmas gifts. My only complaint is that the book falls apart easily.

Extremely useful. Well written guide by someone who clearly knows and loves the area. Lots of excellent "insider" tips and recommendations. A "must have" for anyone living or visiting Berkeley, Oakland, and the surrounding areas!

This is my favorite San Francisco Guide. It includes all the essentials, as well as lists of favorites from seasoned SF locals. I liken it to a San Francisco Through the Back Door kind of guide.

I grew up in Chicago but haven't been back for 20 years. So, when I was assigned to Chicago to open a new business, I bought a few guides, this was one of them. While not intended to be an absolutely complete guidebook (ala the Fodors gold series) it does a good job of listing the top restaurants (by cuisine), top hotels (by price) top entertainment spots (by type) and top 25 sights to see. I especially liked the brevity of this feature because it helped me focus on the most important museums , entertainment and other features of the city. Every listing has a location, nearest mass transit stop, and map coordinates that match the city map that is included with the package. If you're looking for a simple but very useful guide, this is the one.

I found a copy of CIVIL AND SAVAGE ENCOUNTERS in a little bookstore while vacationing in Alaska. The Alaskan landscape is beautiful and awe inspiring. However, once I started reading this diary, I couldn't stop. It is a treasure! I stress, I became so engrossed in Golovin's exceptional descriptions, I totally lost interest in the beauty of Alaska. I don't understand why this diary did not become a best seller.

I loved Golovin's comparative descriptions between his beloved Russia and Europe. Americans will be mesmerized by his perception of the American Civil War.

Golovin has a charming and wonderful vividness in his writing style. Could he have intended for his diary to be published? On the other hand, I have often heard it said that we have lost the art of good writing. We'll never learn the answer. Regardless, CIVIL AND SAVAGE ENCOUNTERS is a wonderful piece of literature.

This is the 2nd edition of Moynier's and Fiddler's High Sierra "best of" guide. John Moynier and Claude Fiddler are very experienced Sierra climbers/guides with hundreds of routes and dozens of firsts to their respective credits. The authors have painstakenly selected over 100 outstanding routes ranging from moderate class 3 peak bagging exercises to Grade V walls and Grade VI linkup routes. The represented climbs are among the most popular and most sought after climbs in the range. Climbers of all skills and goals will benefit from this guide. They provide topos, verbal approach, climbing and descent descriptions and a rich historical perspective on climbing in the Range of Light.

Improvements in this guide include more detailed topos, a larger selection of alternate routes, more historical anecdotes, and a refined selection of climbs.

While this book is an excellent stand alone guide, many climbers would benefit from RJ Secor's Peaks, Passes and Trails as a companion guide.

I rate this book 5 of 5. Most climbing guidebooks are dry material... just the facts Ma'am. But this one colors all of the technical data with stories of old heros and epic struggles. Buy it so these guys will be tempted to write more!

The research by Michael Jay Mjelde made this book possible. The Captain, Daniel McLaughlin, managed to make 42 trips around the Horn without serious incident. The Captain is my great-grandfather on my mother's side and came from the island of Gran Manan in the bay of Fundy. I would love to hear from others who have read the book.

This is a great book for the novice botanist. As a person who just recently started trying to identify wildflowers in the Monterey area, I found this book a great guide. I already have a couple of other books, including the ones from the Audubon Society and from the California Native Plant Society, but this one is so simple and covers most of the flowers you commonly see. It's easy to flip through, the pictures are clear and in color, and it certainly doesn't overwhelm you with technical jargon. I was only sorry it doesn't include some of the smaller/tinier flowers I see around. Maybe in the next edition. A great gift!

'Collision Course' is a mix of reportage, history, and economic and political speculation. One of Bryce Harland's themes is the feeling of common cause by East Asian countries as they face a United States fresh from winning the Cold War and imbued with a renewed sense of manifest destiny. Yet, the book makes clear that common cause is increasingly unable to keep the region from fractionating as their parallel economies struggle for prominence in Western markets, and as America, with the backdrop of a declining Japan, continues to leverage her political and economic dominance to assert her social and political agendas. Harland's central thesis is simple, and to my mind, convincing. The domestic politics of the U.S. are as much a factor as the regional diaspora of the South Chinese in guiding the evolution of East Asian economic and political development. It has historically been the domestic attitudes of the Americans towards the migrant Chinese and Japanese in the U.S. that account for the alternating cycles of discriminatory and liberal trade policies on the region. He cites the yearly torment over Most Favored Nation (MFN) status renewal for China as an example of the schizophrenia that grips the American polity struggling with liberal attitudes towards human rights and conservative views on trade; laced with pressures to scapegoat during times of economic want.

'Collision Course' is an attempt to explicate the oft confusing and tumultuous relationship between the U.S. and East Asia through a historical lens, and to explore the future of that relationship as the forces of history subside with the end of the Communism. As with most world history, the region and its relationship with America has been shaped by two world wars, a number of regional conflicts, internal revolutions, and healthy dose of xenophobic nationalism. Indeed, the involvement of America in East Asia can be traced back to four significant events -- the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry, the American occupation of Japan, the Korean Conflict, and the Vietnam War. In all these cases, American materiel and capital have been instrumental in propelling the economies of the region toward modernization and urbanization. In the end, my sense is that the next collision contemplated by the author will be less of a clash between East and West as it will be between the nations of the region as they jostle for the political and economic access to the U.S.

The author goes to great lengths to show that East Asia is not a homogenous hegemony, but a collection of conflicting interests, cultures, rivalries and nationalistic tendencies that are historically at the razor's edge away from disintegrating into fractional fighting. This complex web of conflicts is largely bilateral, between Japan and China, China and the Europeans, Japan and the U.S., Japan and Southeast Asia, and America and China. Only recently, with the advent of Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) has East-West interactions been multilateral. Harland also makes the point that until the 1980s, the region has been held together by a shared sense of historical colonial victimization. However, as these countries matured, this is being overshadowed by more recent memories of Japan's expansion into Asia, and China's moves into Tibet, Mongolia, Burma, and Vietnam. To a lesser extent, recent memories of the Vietnam war, and role that the U.S. played to stop the spread of Communism in the region seems to carry more saliency with the current generation than the legacy of colonial expansionism a century ago. Today, even as the threat of Communism has diminished, an increase in intra-regional tensions has resulted. Keeping these tensions in check has been a period of double-digit economic growth, fuelled by American money to prop up local governments against the tied of Communism in the 1960s.

Mr. Harland manages to keep his promise to remain detached in his analysis, using a reporting style that is at the same time engaging and neutral in tone. The book does not pretend to explain the psychology behind the 'Collision', although it takes time to explore its socio-economic causes. For students of regional politics in East Asia and the U.S. there is nothing surprising in the book. Yet, it is the author's systematic treatment of the region's history, and his focus on economic and trade-related issues, that brings into relief the underlying reasons for today's headlines; usually obscured by 30-second sound bites on broadcast television.

'Collision Course' provides a clear road map for anyone to see why the Asian Currency Crisis of July 1997 was inevitable. Tight, opaque industrial networks, nationalistic mercantilism, and a suspicion of outsiders fuelled the lack of accountability and made possible the advent of money politics. The book hints of a warning for the future because unless East Asia breaks loose from its obsession with ridding itself of its colonial past, it cannot freely engage the U.S. without the latter resorting to the kind of forced diplomacy that characterized her first contact with the region....