No comments about FODOR-N.MEXICO'91 (Fodor's New Mexico).

5 comments about Moon Handbooks: Puerto Vallarta (3rd Ed.).

1. We just returned from a two week vacation in Mexico, where we travelled from Guadalajara to Puerto Vallarta using the Bruce Whipperman handbook as our guide. The book, which is compact in size, is packed with useful and specific information that made our trip easy and enjoyable. We especially appreciated the back-road tips.



2. If you want to know about more than just the Puerto Vallarta area buy the Pacific Mexico Handbook. Better than 80% of the content of the Puerto Vallart Handbook is included as well as information of the other Pacific destinations. If you do not plan to venture more than 25 - 50 miles from Puerto Vallarta this book adds no additional value.



3. Book was not well written nor was it well thought out. It was difficult to access specific information (such as hotels and restaurants). The author also recommended the Hard Rock Cafe--which made me wary of any other recommendation he had! I'd recommend the Frommers Guide to Mexico for a better picture of Puerto Vallarta and Discover Puerto Vallarta for the pictures and additional information.



4. Every Moon Travel book I have purchased has been far and away the best travel book for the region. Anyone who has traveled in Mexico knows that restaurants and hotels change a lot in one year. The fifth edition of this book, copyrite Nov 2003 is as good as it gets. I also had the Frommers and AAA guide with me for 8 days of driving in and around Puerto Vallarta and the only book I needed was the Moon book.



5. Absolutly positively the worst travel guide I have ever read!!! Don't waste your money. The only thing that surpases what it doesn't include, is what it does include. Hardly anything of value! This book is a waste of a perfectly good tree.

No comments about Aaa 2001 Mexico Travelbook (Aaa Mexico Travelbook).

1 comments about Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts.

1. *Desert Passges,* Patricia Nelson Limerick's first book, surveys a cast of American characters who wrote about their encounters with the deserts of the American Southwest. Her subjects fall into two broad groups: those who hated the desert, and by extension wanted to redeem it by settlement and irrigation, and those who -- however conditionally -- loved it, and by extension wanted to preserve it. The turning point between these two groups fell in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, when the railroads and the obliteration of independent Native American cultures had rendered the desert a scene out of the carriage window, traversed in ease, instead of a horrible wasteland waiting to destroy the naive traveler.

   Limerick's subjects range from the famous -- Mark Twain, whose reaction to the desert inspires some of Limerick's sharpest prose -- to the famous in their own day but now obscure -- like William Ellsworth Smythe. She's pretty hard on almost everybody she treats -- especially Edward Abbey, who comes across as something of a charlatan -- except William Manly. Manly survived a harrowing trek in 1849 through Death Valley to California; he recorded his adventures in sincere and plain prose that repays reading today.

   This book is a revision of Limerick's Ph.D. dissertation, and suffers from some of the faults of the genre -- for which it would be entirely unfair to blame her! Her choice of subjects left me somewhat puzzled, especially the omission, until the very end, of the most important figure in working out our relations to the desert: John Wesley Powell. Powell is a big figure, famously treated in Wallace Stegner's massive biography (the last chapter of Donald Worster's *Rivers of Empire* makes for inspiring reading too); no doubt Limerick felt he had had enough attention, and it was time to turn toward less well-known, but arguably important, persons. Yet his ghost hangs unacknowledged around the text, and the story of America's relations with its arid West just isn't complete without his tangled, contradictory presence.

   Much of the material and indeed many of the same authors treated in *Desert Passges* recur with a somewhat more literary bent in Peter Wild's *The Opal Desert,* which appeared in 1999. A third edition of *Desert Passages* has been announced but hadn't appeared as of this writing.

No comments about Mountain Biker's Guide to New Mexico.

2 comments about Open Range and Parking Lots: Southwest Photographs (University of Arizona Southwest Center series).

1. This is a great book, highly recommended. Hancock and McNamee capture the essence of the strange, mirage-like Southwest, full of ghosts and forgotten dreams.



2. The Southwest US is clearly a great place to take photos, dramatic open spaces and weather plus all those wonderful examples of the hand of man in the environment, mostly for negative reasons it must be said. It is a pity though that Virgil Hancock just doesn't manage to do the area justice. Of the fifty-two photos in the book so many of them seem to lack a focal point (or maybe they are just poorly cropped?) so that the book, I feel, is no more than a collection of ordinary photos.
   
   As the area is so kind to photographers there are some images here that are just super with good compositions, cropping and color, for example, two store fronts in Las Vegas, NM (plate four) a chained tree stump on a trailer (plate thirty-five) or the Jungle bar in Phoenix, AZ (plate forty-one) there are at least another five or so but I feel they were let down by their cropping.
   
   I can recommend these three photo books of the Southwest, Wim Wenders 'Written in the West' (ISBN 3823854690) Troy Paiva's 'Lost America' (ISBN 076031490X) with plenty of stunning night-time photos, presented unfortunately in a rather mediocre designed book and Gerd Kittel's 'Southwest USA' (ISBN 0500541213) eighty beautiful photos shown in a lovely classic photo-book format.
   
   One final point about 'Open Range and Parking Lots' concerns the production, none of the photos have their captions with the image, you have to constantly turn to the back caption page to read them and the page numbering is just plain silly. The first printed number that appears is four, sixteen pages from the start of the book, the five photos that are on these pages are referred on the back caption page as 'N.b. Plates 1-5 appear on pages iii-xvi', predictably there are no Roman numerals on any of these sixteen pages. As I said the numbering is just plain silly!

1 comments about The New Key to Cancun and the Yucatan.

1. I was looking for more detail about the area. For instance, the hotel we chose was not listed. I had read that there was a place in the area where we could swim with the dolphins and that information was not listed in this book. If you are looking for general information this is a good book.

1 comments about Ancient Mexico: An Overview.

1. I bought this book to bring along with me on my trip to Cozumel last month, and while I found this book informative, it seemed to be written for a more juvenille audience. It did make for good light reading at the beach, though.

No comments about Western America in 1846-1847: The Original Travel Diary of Lieutenant J. W. Abert who Mapped New Mexico for the United States Army. With Illustrations in Color From His Sketchbook..

No comments about My Fellow Americans....