No comments about Walks and Rambles in Rhode Island: A Guide to the Natural and Historic Wonders of the Ocean State.

5 comments about Metro Boston, Eastern Massachusetts, Street Atlas (Metro Boston Eastern Masschusetts Street Atlas)(7th Edition).

1. If you're going to Boston and don't know you're way around, you will need this book. You will need to sit down and really look at it, and then keep it with you. If you get lost, don't try and use logic or common sense to unravel your path. Just pull over and get your map out, and make a plan before you try and inch your way back into traffic.
   
   This has got to be the most user-unfriendly town in America. If you are not from here, good luck trying to get around. Even my buddy with GPS gets lost because the thing cannot react fast enough, and doesn't know how to convey directions such as "stay in the left lane, lane markings will disappear and reappear later on slightly different planes, but stay left because the road will suddenly split, but then immediately take a left turn, but not the first left but the slightly more obtuse left turn radiating from just ten yards further down the street." If you a make a mistake, do not imagine for a moment that you can fix it easily. You can go on unimaginable adventures just trying to turn around. For example, if you want to make a left on to Mass Ave from Somerville road, well, you just can't, but that shouldn't be a big deal, you just make a right and find a place to turn around. However, you will literally drive from city to city before you find a place to turn around. I know everybody thinks their own town is eccentric, but Boston is hands down the most passive-aggressive city to newcomers or visitors. Streets change names multiple times in a short stretch, have different names on different sides of the street, all while multiple streets will have the same name. Which is all irrelevant because if you are fortunate enough to see a street sign, it is probably too late to react to it. People here don't seem phased by it, they are often surprised to find out that other cities are laid out in a grid, where the streets hit each other at right angles, four corners only per intersection, and you can actually point yourself in the direction of where are going and find your way there with reason and will alone.
   
   These maps are a nice guide for pedestrians too. And, actually, walking is the easiest way to get around Boston. The challenge of course for pedestrians would still be the Boston drivers. If the cars do stop before hitting you, the drivers will give you a look that let's you know that you've been fortunate. It's a look that says, "I'm not going to hit you with my car, but please understand that this is a choice I have made, at great sacrifice. Your life is henceforth a privilege I've granted you."
   
   One more little thing that complicates getting around Boston. Let's do this in the form of a quiz. Give your best guess at how to pronounce the following neighborhoods: Berlin, Billerica, Cochituate, Leicester, Leominster, Peabody, Woburn, Worcester. Aren't you silly, where y'from, Iowa?



2. American Map consistently produces the best atlases (ADC's atlases are ususally a close second), and this is incontestably the best available resource for navigating the streets of Boston and its suburbs. The Boston area is intelligently divided here into maps for each of the city's neighborhoods and outlying communities, and the detail is rich and reliable throughout. But the best aspect of this atlas, like any other from American Map, is the clarity and simplicity it achieves in spite of its detail. Highly recommended.



3. This atlas has excellent maps of Boston and suburban communities. It was a big help on my recent trip to the Boston area. The main distraction is it's a book of individual town maps colated alphabetically. As you drive across the area, you have to page between different maps in the book, and I couldn't find coverage of two spots that fell between towns. I find it easier to use an atlas laid out on a grid system like the San Diego County Street Guide published by Thomas. There is a guide map showing the grid making it easy to find the page to go to. As you travel east or west, you just turn the page for a continuation of the map. North-south travel is a bit more difficult; you have to look at the top or bottom of the page for the page number to go to next. DeLorme atlases are designed this way, too. The Metro Boston Atlas has some page number references to adjoining maps, but many are missing.



4. Great book for those visiting or moving to Boston. A bit large to carry around.



5. Since I moved to the Boston area more than 25 years ago, I have been using the various editions of this atlas to negotiate the area's notoriously confusing street grid.
   
   Yes, it's organized on a town-by-town basis, not on a grid format, but this is actually easier to use if you have an inkling where you're going, since North-South-East-West are pretty much foreign concepts around here. Obstacles such as rivers, rail lines, and coastlines pretty much conspire to prevent you from traveling across the map in a straight line, and make it difficult to recover if you've made a wrong turn.
   
   Even if you prefer using on-line maps or GPS, you'll not go wrong having this spiral-bound atlas open on the seat next to you. It will get you back on track much more quickly than any other method when you make the inevitable wrong turn.
   
   There's a small-scale area map in the front that will get you onto the major route to the town or neighborhood you're looking for.
   
   Legibility has improved with recent editions. I recommend one for each car.

1 comments about 60 Hikes within 60 Miles: Boston (60 Hikes - Menasha Ridge).

1. As a person who has gotten lost using other walking guide books, I can say this book is really easy to use. I highly recommend it as resource for what to do with a free Saturday afternoon. Also, I really appreciate the driving instructions to the trail head.

1 comments about A Portrait of England.

1. I bought this thinking it would be incredible pictures and history. There are some incredible pictures, but not of famous things like you'd expect..it's more like random lakes and such. It's written from a "save the earth" perspective with people telling why they love the land. Not quite what I wanted for a coffee table book , but it's decent.

1 comments about Passport To Your National Parks Companion Guide: North Atlantic Region.

1. I just got the first 3 of this new National Park Passport Companion books (along with National Capital and SE).
   
   I have yet to go to this area of the country, but as I plan on going to Boston soon, I want to know where the passport stamps are in that area. It looks like this book will really help me out here.

1 comments about Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision.

1. Pictures of Dickens' London interspersed with lengthy quotations from his books, essays, and newspaper reporting. The pictures were the compelling part, and there should have been more of them, along with more concise directed quotation.
   
   Then again, this was not intended as a scholarly treatise on Dickens' use of London as a setting for his novels. But it could have filled that role with a bit more effort.
   
   See my review of Ackroyd's London: The Biography

No comments about Insight Guide New England (Insight Guides New England).

2 comments about Hiking Maine, 2nd Edition (State Hiking Series).

1. This is a great book for the moderate, hobby fisherman. I have been fishing in Maine all my life, however when I recently moved to central Maine I was at a loss as to where to throw my line. I bought this book last year late in the season and had very good luck with the advice given. It gives you peak times and lures to try for best results. I look forward to checking off some of the spots I missed last year and hopefully catch the big one! The only complaint I have is that it is sometimes more geared to fly fisherman than I would like. Overall a very good investment in my book!



2. Overall, this book does a good job of providing succinct summaries of some great hikes throughout Maine. I only gave it three stars, however, because it strangely omits western Maine (the area near the New Hampshire border). Western Maine has some great hiking, including the Maine section of the White Mountains National Forest, Mt. Blue State Park, and Grafton Notch State Park. Oddly, this entire region goes unmentioned.

No comments about Southbury (CT) (Images of America).

4 comments about Audacity, Privateer Out of Portsmouth: Continuing the Account of the Life and Times of Geoffrey Frost, Mariner, of Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, as Faithfully ... Contemporary Histories (Geoffrey Frost Saga).

1. This is volume two in this series, which is set during the American Revolution and features a licensed privateer named Geoffrey Frost. It is every bit as exciting as volume one. Frost is a larger than life hero: learned, brave, and honorable. The sea battles are exciting and there's even a (peaceful) encounter with the explorer Cook.



2. A reader will almost feel the waves washing over the ship during a hurricane, hear the roar of the broadsides, and mingle with the boarders in the sea battles in this realistic depiction of an American privateer prowling the Atlantic during the revolutionary war. And there is much more. The author does a very good job in describing the characters, especially Geoffrey Frost the captain of the Audacity. I found the dialogue very interesting. The crew speak in what might be called colonial New England and express a good deal of colonial horse sense. Every sea adventure buff will enjoy this one.



3. This series seems to be more in the style of Hornblower than the Aubrey set. Its is well phrased but the characters and their relationships are very poorly defined. Plenty of exciting and well detailed naval action but occaisonal apparent inconsistencies or perhaps just confusing descriptions are annoying. This second book in the series will be my last to read. After O'Brian's skill with situations and people, this is thin stuff that a lot of action does not suffice to float.



4. This series has a promising premise -- naval fiction based on the viewpoint of a China trader turned privateer during the Revolutionary war. However, the promise never materializes, largely due to the truly appalling dialog. People in the mid-1700's might have written in that odd, stilted, formal vernacular, but I can't believe that it was ever spoken. Certainly no one ever stood on a quarterdeck and emitted any of the pompous speeches that Geoffrey Frost is guilty of, if only because the battle would be over by the time they finished. The net effect is that Frost comes across as a self-righteous unlikeable prig.