2 comments about Birding Maine: Over 90 Prime Birding Sites at 40 Locations (Falcon Guides Birding).

1. I was excited when I pre-ordered this new book! After getting it I am quite dissapointed. No mention of Machias Seal Island where Puffin watching (and lots of other birds) is truly amazing. I Didn't see anything on Mt. Desert Island where I have observed eagles, loons, and many more birds. Paper quality not very good. I just feel that this was a quickly done, poor quality attempt to cover the state of Maine but it didn't quite make it for me!!



2. If this book was titled like my review, Birding Mid-Coast Maine, I would recommend it highly, since it does a great job with the Mid-Coast region (roughly Darmiscotta to Mt. Desert Island), outside of that area it is poor. A guide to birding in Maine that does not even mention Scarborough Marsh??? Something like 3 sites mentioned in all of Southern Maine, which I know fairly well, and no better for the Downeast region and upstate, which I would like to know better. Needs much better research before it can be called "Birding Maine".

1 comments about Knopf MapGuide: Boston (Knopf Mapguides).

1. I recently moved to MA and needed a quick reference guide for Boston. This guide fits the bill, great lay out! The only improvement I could think of is coating the maps with something to make them more durable. This little guid easily fits into a purse or even a coat pocket and no more unfolding huge maps!

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.

5 comments about Ptown: Art, Sex and Money on the Outer Cape (A Lisa Drew Book).

1. I do not know nor have I ever met Mr. Manso. I think he has written a better than average book that is entertaining, enlightening and sadly disturbing. Let me first point out that the negative reviews here have no substance. They more resemble hysterical reactions of bratty children caught misbehaving than book reviews written by intelligent adults. They do not cite examples from the book itself to take issue with but rather rely on emotional name-calling and imaginary conclusions arrived at without any support. Manso wrote a fine book the facts of which are mostly in the public domain and independently verifiable to anyone taking real issue.
   
   Peter Manso discusses Provincetown's history, evolution and devolution of one of the most exciting and interesting cities of the world. As a straight man that has fallen in love with Provincetown over 15 years ago, I am very grateful to Mr. Manso for pointing out some of Provincetown's current problems. I have considered buying a house there and living in it year round. But after reading it and some of the reviews here on Amazon, Manso's critique has been thoroughly confirmed. It seems that there are people who hate the idea of tolerance even while pretending to be "politically correct." They seem to reject heterosexuals and homosexuals living, working and playing side by side.
   
   Tolerance is for me an extremely important quality in the town I wish to live in for the rest of my life. However, it seems to be undesirable to some. According to at least one reviewer, paranoid militant lesbians have launched an attack on not just heterosexuals who have the audacity to want to live or even just visit P-town, but even on homosexuals who don't pledge allegiance to the party line. The reviewer is a male homosexual.
   
   One of Provincetown's most endearing qualities to me has been its tolerance and willingness to live and let live. I have loved its rejection of mindless mainstream mores. That may sadly be going the way of most other American towns that have an "us against them mentality." It is ironic that gays and lesbians that have been on the receiving end of the discrimination stick would now turn into reverse bigots. What a great way to insure more fear and hate! Bravo! You have thrown down the gauntlet to those homophobes for whom your exclusivity fulfills their prophecies.
   
   On my last visit to Provincetown I stopped into a real estate office and confirmed Manso's allegations of property values driving out the very people that have been born there and who welcomed the wealthy gays who now seem set on throwing out the poor Portuguese, painters, writers and anyone else who can't afford the rent they are now setting.
   
   My wife and I have a number of gay and lesbian friends. One of them has told me a number of times how he dislikes many gays and lesbians that want contact with only homosexuals. I didn't really believe that many homosexuals were like that. I couldn't understand how he believed that let alone that it might be true. After reading Manso's book and the reviews it has inspired I have come to see what my friend is talking about. Perhaps some gays and lesbians do want a town exclusively homosexual. All I can say to them is beware what you wish for! Segregation has never produced anything good thing.



2. While at some points wildly historically innacurate, I might be the best person to review this book other than Mr Manso himself. I know, on a first name basis, everyone who was profiled most heavily in that book, and I have met Mr Manso on several occasions. I lived there untill my father and I had to move last year because of heavily rising property taxes.
   
   The book is, as a whole- exaggerated. And yes, Manso is run out of town, and almost universally disliked. He's a nice person, but after airing everyone's dirty laundry, he has to deal with the consequences.
   His comments on the gay community have been overblown. Millionaires have blown out me, my friends and family out of the town. The Millionaires happent o be- gay. I would be saying the same thing if the millionaires were straight, mind you.
   
   On the whole, a lot of people's reviews of this book got me upset. My town isn't a lesson to be learned- sure, many of the things I grew up with have come and gone, like ice cream and fast food joints owned my what's his name Silva and such, but if all one can see is the psycolgical changes in the make-up of the place, then- you're not looking close enough.
   The sun sets the same way, and the monument will always get dressed up around Thanksgiving, and there will always be the ocean. Long after Provincetown becomes a Gays only Utopia, you will find the ocean, and the light and all that makes it beautiful.



3. I don't think the point of Manso's book is homophobic, but I do think it is prejudiced. Manso is prejudiced in favor of the bohemian strain of Provincetown history in which artists (straight and gay, American and foreign) came to Provincetown as a refuge from the "square" world and, more or less, managed to co-exist with the native Yankees and Portugese. Because bohemians strike an egalitarian pose, whether or not they are wealthy (and many Provincetown bohemians were very wealthy), the bohemian dominance of Provincetown for most of the 20th century had a leveling influence. A wealthy Portugese fisherman or Yankee businessman's home would not seem much different from that of a wealthy artist like Robert Motherwell.
   
   Those who know Provincetown, as Manso certainly does, knows that there was an informal "cap" on ostentation. If you owned an old sea captain's home from the 19th century, you could fix it up just so (and you were almost expected to), whether you were rich enough to live in it yourself for two months in the summer only, or whether you ran it as a gay guesthouse year-round. If you were a wealthy art dealer from New York, you could build a lovely waterfront home in the East End, but God forbid it should look showy (except for the garden), or dwarf the converted sail loft next door.
   
   Manso's point, I think, is that this changed when people began to purchase real estate in Provincetown both as a financial investment and as a manifestation of their own financial success-conspicuous consumption. That Provincetown had remained largely free of this for most of the 20th century, while the Hamptons, Jackson Hole, and other destinations became bloated with ostentation, was a perverse product of the dominant bohemian class. What Manso may not make clear enough is that the dominance of this class was an anomaly; it couldn't last. Eventually, somebody or some group was going to decide that Provincetown was THE PLACE to display its financial success, just as the bohemians declared in the 1910s and 20s that Provincetown was THE PLACE to let it all hang out. Because real estate is the dominant financial market of the late 20th and early 21st century, and Provincetown is one of those places that only has a little bit of it (like Key West, like Manhattan, like the Hollywood Hills) this unstoppable trend inevitably had to manifest itself in the real estate market. And, as Manso points out, a small number of millionaires can quickly crush the affordable housing market in a physically tiny place like Provincetown; it takes longer in a place like Manhattan or Santa Fe.
   
   Really, Manso's book is an elegy to a simpler-or simply stupider-time in which bohemians (first socialists, then beats, then hippies, then a more punky strain, and ALWAYS gays and lesbians) ruled the cultural life of Provincetown. As Manso points out in the cautionary tales of Ciro Cozzi and Tony Jackett, those who were of this world put art, booze, drugs, good times, and sex (not necessarily in that order) above maximizing the value of their real estate. Not so the new class of wealthy gays for whom real estate in Provincetown is the point. I think the book does a pretty good job of making it clear that these gays feel Provincetown is THEIR town, and since real estate is what matters to them (and everybody else, these days) there is no more sincere form of flattery than to develop great digs in Ptown.
   
   Crusty dune poets like Harry Kemp may spin in their graves in the new Provincetown, but the reality is that anyone today who could be transported back to the Provincetown Tennis Club in its heyday in the 1970s would have laughed at the mixed doubles played by aging communists and second tier abstract expressionist painters with lesbian photographers and hippie Jewish real estate millionaires from the Upper West Side on a dusty, pitted court with tumbledown chicken wire fences. All of this presided over by the slicked-back male pulchritude of the PhD pro, Chris Busa. These people WANTED Provincetown this way, and as long as they dominated Provincetown, they could keep it this way. But the fact is that they started to die-of old age and AIDS-and a younger group took over. That group thinks the funky Tennis Club sucks. And they are right; it really is a joke. There are better tennis courts at many minimum security prisons. Trying to explain to them why the Tennis Club was actually great in its own weird way, is like trying to explain why you loved your first junior high boyfriend or girlfriend. You eventually learn that you should just not bother. Peter Manso did bother in Ptown, and I think he should get some credit for that effort, and not simply be branded a homophobe, which is hardly the point of this book.
   
   [...]



4. I suspect all the negative reviews of Ptown were written by Norman Mailer, under various pseudonyms. His hatred of Manso and the book is legendary. But this is a great work. As someone who's been coming to Cape Cod for the last 52 years I have seen the change for the worse that Ptown (yes, we call it that) has undergone. The funky, free-spirited town where everyone does his/her thing as long as no one gets hurt has been replaced by a sort of gay Disneyland. Thank you, Mr. Manso, for telling the world about this.
   
   To borrow a phrase from the book, Manso isn't homophobic, he's wealthophobic. Sure, new money and the people who own it are ruining Cape Cod from the canal to Race Point. The fact that those who are ruining Ptown are gay is just coincidence. Let's not even get into the gross environmental destruction they're laying (or trying to lay) on that fragile strip of sand. What they are bringing to the town is ostentation and bloated self-importance at the expense of others, including fellow gays. A gang of rich bullies should not have the power to destroy a way of life. Let this be a lesson for any other non-conformist town that values things as they are.



5. Peter Manso is an incredible Jerk who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But, I salute him for his fight against the Truro Police Dept mafia. Fight the good fight brother! Spend that trust fund on the legal injustices of the the TPD!

3 comments about The Cape Cod Christmas Cookbook.

1. I received "The Cape Cod Christmas Cookbook" by Mark Jasper as a gift this past Christmas, and although Christmas is in the title, there are holiday recipes in this book that are good throughout the year! I have made and enjoyed several recipes, especially baked goods such as: Cranberry-Walnut Morning Cake, Rachel's Banana Bread and Cliff's Blueberry Muffins. But there are also lovely main courses including: Christmas Cranberry Chicken, Clam Pie and the Butternut Squash Casserole, all of which make easy and hearty meals for these bitter months ahead!

   I'd highly recommend this enchanting volume to anyone who enjoys cooking or for anyone who'd like some secret recipes from some of our famous inns and restaurants here on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.




2. Author Mark Jasper and folk artist Holly Shaker dish (or is that "shake?") it out. And then some. They serve up a most winning menu: tasty recipes (think "Sandwich Glass Pie" and "Lobster Cheesecake") from some of the best local taverns, inns and eateries. There's a heaping side dish of whimsical, wondrous illustrations ... think piping plovers running off with Christmas decorations and mice imbibing in hot chocolate. Perfect fare for those fond of sand dunes, salty air and lobsta stew, served by a window with an ocean view. Seconds, anyone?



3. Although the book includes a few good recipes, the directions on many of the recipes are incomplete or take a lot of interpretation. Also, the addition of cranberries to a standard recipe does not make it either christmasy or from Cape Cod. I have spent the last 28 summers on Cape Cod, and can attest that there are significantly better recipes out there, as well as better written cookbooks. It was a disapponting book.

5 comments about Bridget Jones's Diary.

1. Many people have tried to emulate the wit and insightfullness of this seminal work, but nobody does it as well as Helen Fielding. This book is the origin of much of today's received wisdom on the subject of single women living in London (and probably most other cities in the Western World) - singletons, smug marrieds etc. It is laugh-out loud funny and Fielding has managed to pay homage to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in her plot in a way which flatters both books. A must-read.Love Actually (Widescreen Edition)



2. The book is waaay better than the movie. You could see the entire thing being played out. The movie tried to capture the humor but there are elements that Fielding writes about that just can't be portrayed on screen. Excellent book. It gets 4 out or 5 supermommie stars!



3. This was a GREAT book. It was maybe the most fun book I have read. If you want a good laugh, then read this book. I actually laughed out loud and thought I was going to wake the house up! It was so much better than I thought it would be. I can't say enough about it!



4. I'm a huge fan of the movie. When I finally decided to read the book, boy was I sorry I waited so long!! I love this book, it is so clever, and totally satisfying for those of us who love all the unnecessary cheesiness and romance that a love story can provide. It starts out slow, but once you get going, you wont' want to go to sleep!!



5. The book was a little more used than I anticipated, but I still enjoyed reading it again.

No comments about Fitchburg (MA) (Images of America).

No comments about New Fairfield (CT) (Images of America) (Images of America (Arcadia Publishing)).

No comments about Little Women (Puffin Classics).

1 comments about American Map Central/Eastern Connecticut Street Atlas: Hartford, Middlesex, New London, Tolland, Windham Counties (American Map).

1. Trying to navigate across the state with this is impossible. Rather than a standard atlas - where the end of the page helpfully says "continued on map xx", this is organized alphabetically by town - and in many cases the map doesn't even hint at where you should look as your road runs off the page. Strangely, although owned by the same parent company - American Maps uses this poorly organized way, while Hagstrom Maps are easy to follow and use.