1 comments about Groovy Beijing Map'n'Guide.

1. I just returned from a trip to China and stayed 3 days in Beijing, 3 days in Shanghai and went from there to Shenzen and HK. I bought this map and guide of Beijing and totally relied on it for everything. Without it Im not sure how easy I would have found this city I (it can be a nightmare for non-Chinese speakers). I used it for telling me where to go and eat a decent meal and found a great little diner where I hung out every morning for my all-important good old comfort food breakfast (not congee!) The reviews of the restaurants and shops llsted on the guide I found were totally right on. The map side was easy to follow and had Chinese characters for all the streets which was really important!!
   After using this guide, I went and bought the Groovy Map for Shanghai as well. I think they have Hong Kong too.

5 comments about Lost Cities of China, Central Asia and India (The Lost City Series).

1. The book makes a great read, same as DHC's other books of the "Lost Cities" series. Very entertaining, thought provoking, and well written. One thing though: I don't get why the author keeps calling himself "a rogue archeologist": someone has to explain to him what archeologists do. DHC is no archeologist, whatever he might think; he's a traveler, a gossip gatherer, and a free spirit, but all this has little to do with archeology. I enjoyed his open-mindedness, and the relativism with which he judges most of the theories and hypotheses considered. Going through his whole opus, I can't help noticing that this writer is a really great guy, and that his travel companions and friends must have been lucky to have met him, but archeologist? Please, give me a break. And use some proofreader, for the next edition.



2. Of all of David Hatcher Childress's books, this has to be the most informative(or least informative, depending on your perspective!). He describes to us, the reader, many of the interesting stories he has come across traveling through, among other places, Nepal, Red China, Tibet, Indiana, and the Oriental Express. In addition, Childress provides a nice bibliography in the back of the book, to show many sceptics(people such as myself), that he didn't concoct many of the far-fetched stories he tells in his book from his highly imaginative mind. He explains many theories that others have provided to the public, such as the Great White Brotherhood, Agartha, Shambala, the large Earthen Pyramid in China, and the Silk Road.

   He doesn't vouch for the credibility of any of the stories, so a person can't really fault him for telling us what he has discovered through his travels. Since many people can't afford to travel to the places he describes(although I can, I won't, it seems very dangerous when you don't understand any of the local dialects), the reader will just have to take his word for what it's worth(and the fact he has become quite wealthy off of his 'Lost Cities' series, means his word must be worth something!). I read this book while on vacation in Scottsdale, AZ, a few years ago, and the fact I still remember it should say something about the quality of writing! If you're ever on vacation, this is probably the most interesting book you could find, I highly recommend this book.




3. As someone with a great interest in ancient history and lost civilisations, I bought this book with enthusiasm (it has a title not to be ignored). I feel compelled however to express my disappointment with this book; it is nothing more than a travel account written by a 1970s hippie backpacking through Asia. Occasionally the author would encounter another traveller who would tell an enticing tale (no guarantee of authenticity), and then postulate "is this a hidden mystery?" - clearly gullible, the author seemed open to whomever he encountered and whatever fancy stories they had to tell (the old adage of "gullible American" comes to mind). There is no new information, no quality thought-provoking research, and no new images either - all pictures in the book are old archives published in many other books for decades, and what's more they are positioned between chapters seemingly as an afterthought (there are no references to the images in the text). If you are interested in this subject, go to Graham Hancock who is a genuine researcher and has made genuine new discoveries. Hatcher-Childress's book is a complete waste of money; furthermore, every single page without exception is riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Shame on the author, shame on the publisher. One star for audacity (I'd give it four or five if it was advertised as a travel guide to Asia).



4. I have several of the Lost City series books by David. The others that I have read are both a travel guide and an account of the lost cities he encountered. They were well written. However, this book does still have his travel adventures, but is lacking in the lost cities. Very few entries are refered to with the lost cities. David is not an archologist. He does, however, describe what he sees very well. It is just that this book doesn't have much to describe. If you are looking for a book of facts, this is not the one to buy. It is entertaining.



5. I have been reading books by David Childress for several years and have found them both enjoyable and informative. I like his way of weaving the objective and the subjective together, of blending archaeological, mythological and historical details with a compelling, and often humorous, telling of his own experiences as a traveler in Central Asia. While Mr. Childress does not have a degree in archaeology from a university, this does not make him any less a student, scholar and reporter of information concerned with the antiquities of Central Asia (It is a curious, and sometimes sad, matter that university trained 'specialists' are often so focused on the 'known' and the 'measurable' that they miss or disregard the very important insights that out-of-the-mainstream scholars offer). This book by Childress is not intended to be a serious archaeological text but rather a journal of his experiences and reflections as a traveler (a very skilled one, by the way) and his gleaning of interesting material concerning the myths, legends, archaeology and history of the region. For that he must certainly be applauded. I also very much appreciate the fascinating assortment of photographs and illustrations he has in the book for they give the reader a view that no amount of words can. The only drawback to this book, and to many of his other books, is that it does not have an index, which makes it somewhat difficult to rapidly access different topics (but the table of contents does help with this). Read this book before traveling in the region - you will be pleased that you did.......Martin Gray, author Sacred Earth, Places of Peace and Power.Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power

No comments about The Trans-Siberian Rail Guide.

5 comments about Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures Along China's Ancient Silk Road (Traveler).

1. Stevens and three friends (including author Mark Salzman) follow the route of Fleming and Maillart, a 1930s adventure couple from Beijing to Kashgar, the capital of Chinese Turkistan. This is a fun little book, at times truly hilarious, as Stevens blithely recounts the squalid horrors of traveling in a Third World country, or is challenged again and again by mendacious, obstinate bureaucracy who will say anything to prevent them from traveling. But there's not much history or anthropology to speak of, other than a few comments about the Tibetans or Uighurs, or passages from Fleming's book. Nor does Stevens come to any novel or shrewd insights about China, other than the Cultural Revolution must have sucked, although no one will talk to him about it, and its bureaucracy is like an army in its cold homogeneity. It even dismisses the Tienanmen Square riots at the end! A lightweight, amusing travel piece; it could have bean more meaningful, such as Salzman's books or Bill Holm's Coming Home Crazy.



2. As I have stated in other reviews, I do not like the author's personality too much(favorite quotation from another review: "Stu's a jerk, but...") But this book takes an unlikely premise and turns it into a very gripping account of a travel through Asia. I also highly recommend the book written by one of the other travellers here, Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk.



3. Stevens provides a humorous recounting of a romp through Western China attempting to follow the trail of 1936 travelers Fleming an Maillart along the ancient Silk Road. Night Train to Turkistan is entertaining for its quirky characters including infuriating bureaucrats, reluctant Chinese interpretor (Mark Salzman, author of Lying Awake and Iron and Silk), a six foot female athlete who draws a crowd of suitors and gawkers everywhere she goes, and proprietors of various roadside establishments.

   The four travelers are just outrageous and creative enough to actually make their way from Beijing to Kashgar and back, despite a multitude of bureaucrats that seems hellbent on prohibiting them from doing just that. The book starts out with the quartet delivering skis to a national ski team in a country with no ski areas, in the hopes of obtaining a vaguely official-looking reference letter that might unlock some door somewhere. It goes on from there.

   This was a fairly quick read, and, as other reviewers have noted, it's not heavy on anthropological or historical insights. But I don't think the intent of the book was to provide these insights. This is a case where getting there is all the fun. The book is all about the journey, and those who have attempted to journey through bureaucratic developing nations are likely to recognize the types of frustrations and seemingly inexplicable events and policies recounted here. The book is all about crammed unheated buses and trains and low-flying planes and various other conveyances. It's about imperfectly built Russian hotels and incomprehensible bus stations and greasy roadside noodle stands and scheduled group pit stops and increasingly implausible explanations from government workers, desk clerks, and pencil pushers. This all sounds like an incredible bore, but Stevens' entertaining descriptions take you there and hold your attention to the end. If you are looking for an anthropological or historical treatise on Western China, you will be happier looking elsewhere. But as a humorous recounting of a journey through Western China, this one fills the bill. It is primarily from the perspective of a traveler, and the insights are limited, but the observations of a traveler are well worth the price of the book.

   As an aside, several of the other reviewers suggest that this book was set in 1989 or around the time of the protests in Tiananmen Square. In fact the book was published in 1988, and the journey occurred in 1986, both prior to the protests in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. It is unfair to suggest that the author was minimizing the events of that spring, as they had not yet occurred.




4. 
   Travellers come in many flavors, just like ice cream. Some try to "get in" with the natives of the places they go in order to learn more about foreign ways and perceptions. Others prefer to challenge themselves with tests of strength and endurance, paddling up jungle rivers or scaling giant peaks. There are innumerable variations. However, there is one type of traveller whose tales tire me very quickly. That is the type who likes to regale their readers (or listeners) with the total awfulness of everything, to impress (?) people with what they had to put up with, and to tell how ___________ the people were. (choose from among....greedy, stupid, venal, tricky, persistent, dirty, lying, impossible) Occasionally they meet one or two different individuals who only prove the point about the rest.
   
   Stuart Stevens did not know anything about China. His attitude seems to hover most of the time around the level of "frat boy goes China". He managed to recruit two other babes in the woods, plus Mark Salzman, who did know Chinese, had spent a couple years in China already and had written a decent book about it. It would be interesting to hear Mark's opinion of this trip. That travelling rough in Third World countries tends to be difficult is hardly news. Of course, it all might not have been nearly as bad as Stevens says because he is so securely fastened into the "vomit, spit, and urine everywhere" school of travel writing. Stevens had the idea to contact a famous solo traveller from the 1930s, Ella Maillart, a Swiss lady, who had journeyed with a British man along the southern edge of the Takla Makan desert in Xinjiang province (once known as Chinese Turkestan). He tries to retrace their steps, but fails totally and completely. He is forced by Chinese bureaucracy to take the usual tourist route around the north of the desert, winding up in Kashgar, almost to Pakistan. This is an interesting part of the world, and when Stevens can get away from his lightweight moaning about the primitive conditions, the cold (who told him to go in December ?), the bad food, and duplicitous, intransigent Chinese, he writes a nice description. In fact, I would say that this is a well-written travel book with nice flashes of humor, but focussed mostly on the negative. The author takes a leaf from Carlos Castaneda in his "Conversations with Don Juan". He just repeatedly fails to get the message. If he had only decided early on that Chinese hate to tell others "NO" directly, but prefer to give some excuse which may sound lame to Westerners, but which indirectly tells the recipient that "what you are asking is not possible", we could have been spared all the incredulous, open-mouthed astonishment at the Chinese bureaucrats' "lying ways". What we have here is a failure to communicate. I'm sure this is all part of a non-organized trip to Turkestan, but it is not the major part, nor is it a very interesting part. If you are into the Yuck School of Travel Writing, this work is just up your alley. If you would like some sort of perspective on Xinjiang, its people, history and problems, give this book a miss.



5. A travel memoir from an abrasive guy who convinces three friends to go with him to China in the mid-1980s to re-trace the fabled Silk Road route across the high Chinese desert to India. The friends are David, a fitness nut who looks like a special forces recruit; Mark Saltzman, the acclaimed author of his own memoir of China, Iron And Silk, who is along to translate for them; and Fran, a six-foot tall athlete whose statuesque looks ensure that she is mobbed by amazed, admiring crowds wherever they go.
   
   The Han Chinese especially, and China in general, come off in a very negative light: a backward country filled with lying, slothful officials who despise Westerners. This is no Iron And Silk though I did shoot through it briskly due to its clean-cut writing and unrelenting tension (as they struggle with the nightmarish Chinese bureaucracy that blocks their every step).
   
   There's all sorts of tension in the memoir: building within David, who most cannot stand the pitfalls of bureaucracy; and rising between aggressive Stuart who likes to ask former members of the Red Guard how many grandmothers they slaughtered during the Cultural Revolution, and gentle Mark who seeks a way to translate while saving everyone's face. Stuart comes off as a jerk. The memoir is centered so firmly on him that the others barely come across. I think Fran or Mark would have had way more interesting viewpoints than Stuart does.
   
   Throughout his journey, he enjoys asking probing questions of almost every faltering-English-speaking Chinese he meets: questions that put them on the spot in regards to China's troubled past and current government (neither of which is these individuals' faults). That's fine and well when he's attempting to make some smug Communist party official uncomfortable, but not when he's badgering ordinary little people who are afraid to comment or who are stuck living under bad circumstances and don't need their faces rubbed in it by some arrogant tourist. On the other hand, Stuart's travel difficulties had several laugh-out-loud funny moments, and their airline trip near the end of their journey has to be read to be believed.

No comments about Fodor's Beijing's 25 Best, 5th Edition (25 Best).

1 comments about Xi'an, Shaanxi: Chang'an and the Terracotta Army, First Edition (Odyssey Illustrated Guide).

1. I purchased the book with the idea it was more of a history book and found out it was a travel book and not easy to follow. Great pictures and some good advice for travelers to china.

No comments about Insight Pocket Guide with map Manila (Insight Guides).

No comments about Beijing Travel Map (China Regional Maps).

2 comments about Playing with Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island (Twentieth Century Lives).

1. Paterson is living on a small island in the Philippines and he is joining the natives in diving (i.e. fishing) for a living. We scuba-divers, as we only come for 1-2 week vacations, often are not experiencing the reality around our dive sites. Paterson's book was helping me understanding more of the countries I was visiting. Very instructive are his personal insights about ecology in a third world country and the connections to the economical and social structure. I found it very valuable that the insights do not follow the well known beaten paths about the third world but are rather well founded, personal observations. This makes this book a much more interesting read than any other book about the subject that I have ever read before.



2. i read this book so many years ago, but i can still remember
   how good it is. this book is not only about the underwater
   world but also about the goings-on in a typical barrio in
   the philippines. it has a socio-economic aspect to it that i
   found quite realistic, having been born and raised in that very
   same third world country. it amazed and pleased me that a
   foreigner like hamilton-paterson could, quite accurately, capture
   the very essence of filipino rural society---like the old woman who
   he suspects isnt so aloof and taciturn as she seems
   and the children of the barrio who frolick in the water and
   in their humble amusements, oblivious of the shortcomings of a
   third world upbringing. the book is an unusual stew of underwater
   adventure and an unpatronizing account of a life among barrio folk.

3 comments about Culture Shock! Malaysia.

1. This book an invaluable resource for anyone traveling to Malaysia. Did you know it's highly offensive to hand someone an object with your left hand? This book explains the local customs and cultures, so you will be a welcome guest, not one who is just tolerated.



2. this book was an excellent guide to malaysia, it not only helped my camping trip there, it was enjoyable as a book as well



3. I bought this book shortly before moving to Malaysia for a year. Reading it filled me with absolute terror. It made the country sound uncompromisingly alien and rather unpleasant. Thankfully I ignored the book and discovered Malaysia to be a very pleasant and incredibly inviting place.
   
   The problem with the book (apart from the writer's continually negative attitudes to everything) is her very narrow perspective. Before coming to Malaysia, she admits, she spent her whole life in a small Swiss town. Thus, she finds everything that is slightly different from her upbringing horrifying and worth commenting on. The fact that not everyone in Malaysia is European and that they don't eat European food is considered worth several awe-inspired mentions . For anyone who has ever travelled, or who has a more cosmipolitan background, most of these comments are useless and are in fact rather nauseating.
   
   Even worse, however, is the fact that she is only writing for those likely to live in her very specific situation - namely as the wife of a rich ex-pat. She spends a whole chapter lamenting the difficulty of choosing a good maid. She also points out the importance of finding things to do when you are at home and your husband is at work.
   
   For me, as someone working in Malaysia full-time for a relatively modest salary, all this was completely useless. In fact, I'd imagine that for the bulk of people coming to Malaysia, much of this information will be either off-putting or superfluous.
   
   Thus, I'd recommend avoiding this book - otherwise you might decide not to come at all.