No comments about Where New York City Shop!: Great Shopping Wherever You Are (Where to Shop Guides).

1 comments about Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year-New England and New York (Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year).

1. Are you fascinated by the many wonders of nature? Did you know that there are a lot of amazing natural phenomena occuring right around you?

   This book is a unique and excellent guide to the most spectacular natural phenomena occuring in your region. The information is neatly organized and detailed directions are included. I wish I had discovered this book earlier! Many of my favorite spots for nature-watching, which took me many years of exploring to discover, are readily listed in it.

No comments about Rand McNally Fab Map Midtown Manhattan, New York: Featuring the Theater District (Rand McNally fabMAP Midtown Manhattan).

5 comments about Breath, Eyes, Memory.

1. This book tells of a girl named Sophie who is raised in Haiti by her aunt Tante Atie, and later goes to New York to spend time with her mother. It is a very moving story and it tells about the culture of Haiti. It tells of Sophie growing up and some parts are sad but I really enjoyed this book, and read it in one day. I would read it again. I donated this one to a local supermarket for Juvenille Diabetes Research and it was gone within the hour. I hope that the next person enjoyed it as much as I did. This book was well-written, moving, and easy to read and understand.



2. "Breath, Eyes, Memory".....first part was very good. Second part not so good. The rest went downhill.
   I thought the story would focus more on Sophie's childhood. If that were the case, maybe I would have understood her and the relationship with her Mother better. Maybe I would have cared about the characters.



3. Danticat's novel is written in a fluent style with a simple vocabulary. Although she won't send readers digging through their dictionaries, "Breath, Eyes, Memory" will string your emotions as the life of Sophie Caco unravels from her childhood in Haiti to her parenting the early years of her own daughter's life in New York.
   
   As a middle-class college freshman guy, the hardships and joys (although seldom without the accompaniment of the former) are foreign to me. I have not experienced the pains of living without a father, the confines of Haitian culture that emphasizes family responsibility above all else, the horrors of sexual abuse, growing up a fatherless child, or heard the colorful and poetic language of Haiti's people. And yet, I found this novel extremely compelling. In essence it is a story of life's most important battles and how where we came from affects the way we deal with them.
   
   I highly recommend this short but impactful and page-turning novel to everyone up for a poetic journey through a gamut of powerful emotions.



4. This is a great novel about the diaspora of a Haitian girl to the US. Beautifully written, is the story of how mother and daughter come to terms in the new environment. I strongly recommend it to all readers.



5. "Breath, Eyes, Memory" is the story of a young Haitian girl, Sophie, whose mother travels to New York when her daughter is very young, leaving Sophie in the care of her Tante Atie. Eventually Sophie's mother sends for her child, and the girl must travel to the United States to start a new life. I thought this book would focus on the struggles of a Haitian girl adjusting to American society, but Sophie's real demons lay with her family's tragic history, which unfolds bit by bit as the years go by. Sophie ultimately breaks away from her mother but is unable to escape from the horrors of her past. She eventually returns to her home country in search of answers and redemption.
   
   I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The subject matter is difficult to read, but this book depicts a lifestyle that was a reality for so many Haitian women. Although Sophie and her female relatives endure many tragedies throughout the course of this story, "Breath, Eyes, Memory" also celebrates strong family ties and the power that comes with being a woman. This is truly an amazing book.

2 comments about STREETWISE® Compact Manhattan.

1. This map is perfect. It has street names, interest points, subway stops, and a good layout. It is laminated, so it lasts. This new smaller size is a better fit in my pocket -- the only thing I've always wanted from the full-size maps.



2. The map was very accurate, but very small. Unless you were in bright sunlight, you needed a magnifying glass to see the details.

No comments about A Quiet Walk in Central Park: Exploring the Beauty of a New York Treasure.

No comments about Gerrit Engel: Manhattan New York.

4 comments about A Hoosier Holiday (1916 Travel Biography).

1. Theodore Dreiser is one of America's great authors, but he is also an enigma wrapped inside a contradiction. Forever in awe of the "great social forces" lurching mankind forward, and inspired by the great financial titans and clever capitalist geniuses who attempted to reap the whirlwind, Dreiser nevertheless embraced communism late in his life as the antidote for the injustices plaguing mankind. He was a spirited social rebel, railing against orthodoxy and Puritan "Babbitts" who would foist their Midwestern morality down upon him, but at the same time, as he demonstrates in this book, his idealization of the small-town Hoosier philistines in Warsaw, Sullivan, and other whistle stop towns far removed from the Broadway footlights he had known intimately by the time this epic journey to the Heartland commences. Dreiser devoted hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages of prose to attacking the small-town "Babbitts" sharing the views of another world-weary cynic, Henry Louis Mencken. And yet, for all his caustic attitudes toward rigid conventions, Dreiser swoons in near reverie after catching first glimpse of the mundane streets, the old grammar school, feed store, and the simple folk he remembered from his youth. In other passages,examples of plain country living he encounters along the bumpy, dusty backroads of America circa 1914, are ridiculed and scorned as one would commonly expect of Theodore Dreiser and his war against society's religious and social conventions. Nevertheless, Dreiser's personal observations on life are often more engaging and inciteful than in some of his later novels. He is an American master; a pioneer of literary realism, and despite the contradictions, this is a fine and engaging volume exploring a vanished American landscape. Mr. Brinkley is to be commended for presenting it to the reading public again after all these years.



2. I read Sister Carrie when I was a teenager in China. The other day I listened to a Hoosier's holiday on Talking Books. He went back to his hometown after some thirty years. I went back to my hometown, Hangzhou, China and saw my old house now completely destroyed and replaced by a huge scaffolding. Somehow I felt my experience wasn't so different from Dreisers. I liked the book so much I'm going to order a copy to read certain parts again, although I have been in Indianapolis exactly once in my lifetime. Indianapolis and Hangzhou are world's apart. Dreiser and me are only 50 years apart but I feel I knew how he felt. Kai Lai Chung



3. I read Sister Carrie when I was a teenager in China. The other day I listened to a Hoosier's holiday on Talking Books. He went back to his hometown after some thirty years. I went back to my hometown, Hangzhou, China and saw my old house now completely destroyed and replaced by a huge scaffolding. Somehow I felt my experience wasn't so different from Dreisers. I liked the book so much I'm going to order a copy to read certain parts again, although I have been in Indianapolis exactly once in my lifetime. Indianapolis and Hangzhou are world's apart. Dreiser and me are only 50 years apart but I feel I knew how he felt. Kai Lai Chung



4. 
   In the summer of 1915, at a party in NYC for Edgar Lee Masters, illustrator Franklin Booth, a fellow Hoosier, asked Dreiser if he would care to accompany him on a motor trip to Indiana. Sensing the possibility of making a book out of the trip, Dreiser agreed. On August 11, Dreiser and Booth, along with a driver/mechanic named Speed, left NYC for the great midwest of their childhoods.
   
   This, the book that resulted from the trip, is many things: travelogue, personal memoir, soap box for Dreiser's unorthodox beliefs, among other things. As a travelogue, it's relatively easy to trace their journey almost town to town (no maps are in the book) because Dreiser names many of them; he is also impressed by a lot of them and seems to be consistently enthused about what might be around the next bend. The year being 1915, one might assume they would've taken the newly established Lincoln Highway, but they didn't, electing to go via a more circuitous route through Scranton, Elmira, and Buffalo. Dreiser is obviously thrilled by motor travel and waxes ecstatically about it throughout the trip.
   
   After reaching Indiana and visiting some old familiar places, Dreiser's comments are sometimes cynical and critical (especially of small-town attitudes and prejudices), but are also enthusiastic and proud (he has a Whitmanesque belief in the American people). But the reader must also endure sentences like these: "I often ask myself what it is all about, anyhow, and what are we here for, and why should anyone worry whether they are low or high, or moral or immoral. What difference does it really make?" Expressing sentiments like these is what kept Dreiser in trouble with the critics.
   
   All in all, it's a very interesting book. Dreiser's muscular prose pulls the reader along, and most of what he has to say is still relevant. The only thing sorely missing is an index, which would be very helpful. Like all long car trips there are slow, dreary stretches, but not nearly enough to wish you stayed home.

4 comments about Moon Metro New York City: Unfold the City.

1. I've never written one of these reviews before, but after using Moon Metro: New York City on my last trip, I simply had to say how helpful it was. The maps were fantastic and made a city that was new to me incredibly accessible. My friends and I picked several restaurants and shops at random from the book and were never disappointed. The reviews were right on. I fell in love with New York and I can honestly say my experience would not have been the same without this guide.



2. I've used lots of different travel guides in the past but have always been disappointed with something about them, so I usually end up bringing two or three books with me, which [stinks] big time. That's why I really like these Metro books. Small, chock full of info the I need, and easy to use. Besides the cool blue covers, what really makes them stand out is the foldout maps. I've used the SF and NYC Metros and regretted buying the Fodors and Let's Gos. Save yourself some luggage space, time, and money and pick up one of these books instead of a pile of the others.



3. I decided to bring Moon Metro New York City with me on my first trip to the Big Apple. I couldn't have made a better decision! This guidebook never failed me once in my travels through the city. I loved how easy it was to read, the colorful pages, the insightful descriptions, and the pocketbook size. I'm going to make sure my next vacation will be a destination that Moon Metro covers! Avalon Travel Publishing and Moon Metro New York City deserve five stars.



4. Nice size to carry. Good information, however, difficult to find info without going to index. And one has to flip from one map to another. It almost assumes one knows where there are to begin with. But well organized if you already know a lot about NYC.
   
   Not good for reading on a street corner.

1 comments about New York's 50 Best Places to Find Peace & Quiet, 5th Edition (New York's 50 Best Places to Find Peace and Quiet).

1. An excellent pocket-size guide to restfull oases in NYC. Even my inveterate NYC friends say they learned something new. Use this with the thicker City Secrets guide. Sorry, there is nothing more to be said. Buy this book!