No comments about His Glimmering World: The New York Photographs of John Stahle.

2 comments about New York Walks (On Foot Guides).

1. Great ideas to help you to figure out where to go in NYC. just follow each route... very helpful !



2. Awesome book for both residents and tourists alike. Great aerial-view mapping to have a better 'feel' for the layout of the city and its enchanting neighbourhoods. Highly recommend to anyone curious to explore this fantastic city by foot.

No comments about Paul Auster's New York.

4 comments about Moon Handbooks Hudson River Valley (Moon Handbooks).

1. This book is the best guide to the Hudson River Valley that I've seen. It was a big help for planning weekend road trips and it also let us find cool new things to do. I think it'd be a great guide for anyone who visits the area often and is looking for something different than the same old thing. The writer really knows her stuff. Great book!



2. The guide not only offers wonderful suggestions for dining and lodging, but insight into activities and off the beaten path exploration. Clearly, the author's love and knowledge of the region resonates through the book. A very helpful tool for planning a weekend getaway, or a longer stay in this beautiful region of New York state.



3. If you have access to no other guidebook on the Hudson River Valley, the Moon Handbook provides an adequate roadmap. The descriptions of attractions are fairly detailed, the maps are easy to follow and the layout of the book is clear. It is dry and descriptive, however, and lacks the kind of personal evaluations that make other guidebooks so inspiring. It reads more like a government pamphlet than a travel book.



4. Compared to the 6 other Moon Handbooks I have (and have used extensively with many recommendations given to others), this is the least informative and I'm kind of surprised about that since it's focused on a very specific region of New York State. The New York State Moon Handbook gave far better more information on this region than this book did and I'm glad I had both of them on my trip. The book isn't a complete dud though and it certainly beats the travel book published by the nationally known auto travel club.

No comments about Cycling Along The Canals of New York State, 2nd Edition: Scenic Rides On The Historic Waterways Of The Empire State.

5 comments about Tin Lizard Tales: Reflections from a Train.

1. I am both a traveler and a lover of traveler's tales. I read John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley several times with I was a girl and as a teenager I poured over William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways. Oh the places they talked about. How badly I wanted to go. I was born with the road in my gens and my jeans. I wanted to follow the setting sun and be there when it came up.
   
   So I could hardly wait to dive into Mr. Wallace's book. I'm not a little girl anymore, not a teenage anymore either. I've traveled the world wide and plan to keep right on a travelin' till I die, but I can't get everywhere, so sometimes I have to read the accounts of others to see and understand those places I'll never get to. I've ridden trains all over Europe and Asia, but have never set foot on one in the States, except for that steam locomotive that goes from Williams, Arizona to the Grand Canyon, but that's a touristy thing and doesn't really count.
   
   From the first paragraph in the prologue I knew that I was giving myself over to a gifted writer and by the time I finished the first chapter on train safety, I knew I'd be spending the whole day with the book. Mr. Wallace spins many little, often humorous stories in his punchy short chapters, each one begging you to read just one more and before I knew it I was halfway thought the book and hungry.
   
   I made a cheese sandwich, then got on with the book, reading well into the night. I loved the book, the stories, Mr. Wallace's wit, his descriptions and his bits of history. At first, I must admit, I was a bit put off, because sometimes Mr. Wallace isn't always politically correct, but who is. However, at first reading, when he said he saw a smiling little brown boy outside the train window, I gripped the book hard, then I remembered Mr. Wallace is a couple generations older than me and he's not being disrespectful. That little bit aside, I've gotta say, this is one heck of a travel book and it inspired me to go online the day after I read it and check out getting my own North America Rail Pass.
   
   Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne
   
   PS. I didn't know Tin Lizard was Rail Road Jargon for a Streamliner. Now, after reading this book, I'll forever be calling passenger trains, the Tin Lizard Express.



2. This book is categorized as Travel/Essays. I never buy books on travel or essays.I've never been interested in hearing about someone else's trip or opinions. However, I have been interested in taking a train trip since we lived in Arvada, Colorado in the eighties and Amtrak went practically through our backyard. I thought this book might give me some insight to train travel. It did exactly that, and so much more. Mr. Wallace's book was a delightful surprise. It has everything. If he had taught my history classes way back when, I would have learned a lot more,and definitely would have enjoyed them more. The most pleasant surprise was his humor. It is my favorite type from a writer--low-key and natural;I didn't see it coming. I smiled, I chuckled, and sometimes I laughed out loud.
   
   I talked to myself, out loud,throughout the book: "Well, I'll be darned." "Wow!" "I didn't know that." There were even tears--especially in the chapter about the World Trade Center and the events of 9/11.
   
   I recommend this book as a fun, interesting, informational and educational read. I will be looking forward to more books by this author.



3. This book, categorized in the travel/essays genre, was written while author Schuyler Wallace was taking a month-long train trip through the United States and Canada with his wife. I was attracted to the book because I have always wanted to travel by train myself, and so I thought it would be interesting to read tales of train travel. To my surprise, however, very little of this book was about train travel itself. Rather, the book's subtitle, "Reflections from a Train," more accurately captures its essence, as author Wallace offers his commentary on the places and people he and and his wife encounter during their travels.
   
   For the most part, I enjoyed Wallace's reflections on places. He does a nice job of providing historical information on the many areas of the country they visit, from reviewing the Lincoln vs. Douglas debate while traveling through Illinois to providing to statistics on Niagara Falls and even my own city, Rochester NY. But in addition to his interesting educational commentary on various American locales, Wallace takes more of a lecturing stance about certain people and companies, and that's where I wanted to get off the train. For example, what starts off as "Beef with the Excel Corporation" turns into a three-chapter rant about how beef and chicken are processed and how the group PETA just makes everything worse. Wallace, a retired fire chief, also comments about how the World Trade Center situation was handled when visiting NYC, and throughout the book, he makes frequent jabs at things/people he does not like, from graffiti to Howard Stern. I didn't necessarily disagree with Wallace's opinions, I just found them to be glaringly out of place in what was supposed to be a "travel" book. However, I definitely did enjoy parts of this book, especially those that focused more on the experience of train travel itself; Wallace talks more about the onboard experience when he and his wife are traveling on Canada's VIA Rail, which he compares very favorably to Amtrack.
   
   The book's back cover describes the author as "an opinionated man who has been around," and I think that's a fairly apt description. Given this, I think this book would be best enjoyed by those who are older (Wallace is in his 70s), and just as opinionated, especially if they share Wallace's take on things. Finally, note that this is a self-published book; I did find errors in the text throughout.



4. Reviewed by Wendy Cleveland for Reader Views (5/08)
   
   Schuyler Wallace and his wife, Carol (to whom he dedicates the book and describes her as a fantastic traveling companion) take a 30-day trip by train through the United States and Canada from Bakersfield, California in "Tin Lizard Tales." (Tin Lizard was the name applied to streamliners by old-time railroaders which I did not know.) This 30-day trip encompasses stops in various cities from Sacramento, Chicago, New York City, Washington, DC, Niagara Falls, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Portland, and back home to Bakersfield. Along the way Mr. Wallace shares his experiences (some opinionated, some not) as well as the history of some of the cities. While they were traveling through Chicago there were essays on the Great Fire; Erie Pennsylvania on the fishing industry; New York City on the World Trade Center and Harlem, Washington, DC on Gettysburg, and Niagara Falls on Sing Sing Prison. Each section of the book was broken down by areas they visited. He describes the scenery and monuments like you were there. Their reaction to seeing the World Trade Center site and the Statue of Liberty was particularly heart-wrenching.
   
   Mr. Wallace was very vocal when it came to the environment (some of the places they passed in their travels were littered and dirty with graffiti), homelessness, poverty, and animal cruelty (he describes slaughterhouses of yesterday and today) which I found very hard to read. However, I did enjoy his comical side especially when he talked about his fellow passengers (the Balkan Bitch Chapter was hilarious) and the descriptions of the sleeping quarters as being smaller than an average casket. (That's probably why they chose to make a few stops to stay in a hotel along the way. I know I would have.)
   
   "Tin Lizard Tales" was well-researched, particularly the historical events and the evolution of trains and the Amtrack system. This book would fare well with both men and women who enjoy travel essays. As I've never taken a trip on a train before, I salute Schuyler and Carol Wallace for being able to travel and sleep on one for 30 days. He humbly sums it up at the end of the book "It was fun while it lasted, as they say, but I wouldn't want to live there."



5. Tin Lizard Tales: Reflections from a Train
   Tin Lizard Tales is a book about a journey. It's not a travelogue, one of those handy pocket guides (a Baedeker) for vacationers, honeymooners or the retired, those seeking travel to wile away their stress and woes, ramp up their libidos or add another bumper sticker to their travelal ("I visited Yosemite" or "I climbed the Eiffel Tower"). No, this book is travel literature, the kind of book that takes you to places that provide theatre for exemplifying moral or aesthetic values. Tin Lizard Tales is more akin to Homer's Odyssey or Dante's Inferno or Bunyan's A Pilgrim's Progress or Swift's Gulliver's Travels than to Pausanias' Description of Greece or Johnson's A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland or Steve's Europe Through the Back Door.
   
   That is not to say that Tin Lizard Tales won't help ease your way if you're intent on riding the rails to the destinations Mr. Wallace describes, places such as Chicago, Buffalo, New York City and Washington, D.C., both big and slope shouldered cities. It is just that its real value lies elsewhere--it's a tale of virtues, a morality tale of the consequences of good and bad behavior. It recounts a visit to that most adventuresome place, the human zoo in situ, and then, after all that gawking there, it recounts the Odyessean joy of safely returning home to those who truly care about you, to your Penelope.
   
   This is an honest book, the kind of book you would expect from a virtuous, plain speaking man. Mr. Wallace is that man, a retired fireman from Bakersfield, California, the sort of man who gives Californian's a good name--a life long, hardworking public servant who loves his wife and family and his country, a man secure enough in what he is and what he believes to dare speak truth to the powers of socio-political sappiness (which seem to oppress us from the seaboard states these days) without off-putting self righteousness but with an ingratiating sense of humor. "Man is his own star; and the soul that can render an honest and a perfect man, commands all light, all influence, all fate."
   
   This is a book about the aesthetics of association, with a slant reminiscent of the ancient Greek reverence for the virtue of hospitality. In this book, you will meet both Polyphemus (the rude and inhospitable) and Nausicaa (the gracious and hospitable). Mr. Wallace sees hospitality and solidarity as twinned and intertwined values: You cannot feel a sense of solidarity with rude, ill-mannered people, those who delight in abrasion or in using others to met their needs, whether those people are poor or rich or somewhere in between. Here, what is inculcated is that virtuous behavior is not matter of social class. It is a matter of family and culture, of micro and macro influences in how people mature. But fair warning: There is no balm in this book either for lip service Leftists ("blighters ... living in luxury and talking about socialism" whose inauthenticity betrays a lack of virtue) or for rapacious free marketeers (greed is not good). Unvirtuous ill-mannered behavior is not excused here on the grounds that it's impelled either by some social disadvantage or by the needs of personal freedom. Behaving in a way that allows humans to associate tolerably does not require an aristocratic pedigree or a pilgrim ancestor; it does not require wealth or membership in any particular class; it does not require athletic prowess; it does not require any particular ethnicity or racial heritage or sexual orientation. It is something learned usually from well mannered parents and peers; it's self control; a desire to restrain the narcissistic impulse. Simply, the play of virtue or its absence is not a prerogative of either the working class or the bourgeoisie; it embraces everyone.
   
   The virtues extolled in Tin Lizard Tales have a stoic cast, the values that would be second nature to a Scot's Presbyterian, the cultural heir to the likes of John Calvin or John Knox. "Joy for humans, said M. Aurelius, lies in human actions: kindness to others, contempt for the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature." Virtuous are those who are brave, hard working, well mannered, courteous, efficient, family oriented, honest, loyal, clean, frugal, humble, thankful for life's simple pleasures, and able to suffer with quiet dignity. In this book, you will meet those who have the right stuff--for instance, the generous cab driver; Eleanor and George; the Langfields; the Thomas's; Priscilla; and the courageous fireman and policeman of New York City during 9/11.
   
   Unvirtuous are those who are dishonest, envious, greedy, ill-mannered, discourteous, rude, slothful, gluttonous, irresponsible, disloyal, unclean, revengeful, and all those matriculating in the School of Tricksters. Unforgettable are the rude and vulgar characters that emerge from the baseboards during this journey: The "Balkan Bitch;" "Pizza Boy;" the perpetrators of the Chicago Black Sox scandal; the Cab Hustler and the outlaw cab driver--"Jesse James;" the ill-mannered doughboy nitwits; Mr. Bootstraps; and the ill-mannered ragamuffins on the Ferry.
   
   In Tin Lizard Tales, we also receive a dose of the omnipresent, vulgar, ill-mannered celebrities, shilled in the media, such as Rosie O'Donnell--the vulgar victim of ambiguous gender discrimination--and Howard Stern--the vulgar exhibiter of exhibitionists, to whom virtue is pornography--and Donald Trump--the bloated huckster, cousin to Gordon Gekko but with a publicist (said Robert Hughes, "one of America's chief vulgarisms")--all role models for strident rudeness. These buffoons are worthy of their forbears in great literature--for example, those morally wayward travelers in that donkey train parodied in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales--such as the narcissistic Wife of Bath and the hypocritical Pardoner. "I preach for nothing but for greed of gain and use the same old text, as bold as brass, radix malorum est cupiditas... ."
   
   There is a wisp of nostalgia in Tin Lizard Tales, a quiet longing for a vanishing America--that rugged untamed land of the hardworking pioneer, people such as the Tryon's hacking a life from the backwoods of Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. "Virtues are," said Emerson, "in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule."
   
   In Tin Lizard Tales, we realize that we are in the midst of a revision of American values. The virtues of striving, and rugged individualism--the ethic of self reliance (laggards are unwelcome) expressed in Emerson's Self Reliance--are waning. Nudged they are, slowly but inexorably, from their pride of place by that juggernaut of collectivist virtues, that ethic of self promotional positioning for government deals and identity privileges, that scheme virtues the purpose of which is to promote accidents of birth: gender or race or sexual orientation--"virtues" that appear now to trump the virtues of acquired skills and sentiments: manners, modesty, courtesy, and personal responsibility.
   
   That is not to suggest that Mr. Wallace is not insensitive to the abuses of the past, the absence of virtue of some of our forbears. Quite the contrary. No one could fail to feel the misery of so many struggling immigrants working, so vividly described in this book, in hellish places such as the Andersonville-like Chicago stock yards in the late 19th century. After reading his chapter entitled "Life Around the Stockyards," who could not decry the base exploitation of the significantly disadvantaged? What manner of man could so callously use his fellow man? The unvirtuous of course.
   
   Tin Lizard Tales also has a vein of American Romanticism, particularly in the chapter entitled "Culture on the Hudson." This is perhaps the thematic core of this interesting book. There we are reacquainted with the likes of Washington Irving, John Burroughs, William Cullen Bryant, the Hudson River School of painters, and James Fenimore Cooper and his famous Natty Bumppo--"the rugged individualist, self-reliant, and morally upright." Tin Lizard Tales reminds us of William Cullen Bryant's, Letters of a Traveler. And reading this chapter stirs images from the likes of Frederic Edwin Church, in his painting Twilight in the Wilderness. Here we appreciate the longstanding American love of nature, to be contrasted with the images of the city as a place of moral corruption, poverty and death. Here we have a romantic journey to the countryside, where "American nature," said Robert Hughes, "was one vast church." We have all prayed in that church. The short description of Mr. Wallace's canoe trip as a young boy with his brother up Soquel Creek in a chapter entitled "Land of the Hudson's Bay Company" stirred the same sense of awe that I had in reading for the first time Twain's description of Lake Tahoe in Roughing It or Hemingway's description of the trout streams in Northern Michigan in The Big Two Hearted River.
   
   This book is worth reading--it has humor, moral instruction, fascinating characters in both beautiful and dangerous places, tossed with some rewarding lessons on anthropology, geography and history. Overall, it brims with personality.

5 comments about The Food Lover's Guide to The Best Ethnic Eating in NYC.

1. While perhaps not as streamlined as some others like the Zagat Survey, this is my favorite restaurant guide of the five or six I own. Its priority is the same as mine: good and interesting food, rather than decor, service or even "star quality." Most of the selections are very affordable (for New York City), which helps.
   
   In my area so far, I've tried two or three restaurants in three ethnic groupings. This guide has been accurate: the restaurant which the guide features in each group has been the best, and only in one case the most expensive.
   
   My only complaint would be that browsing for a particular type of ethnic food isn't always fast. The groups are logical but not totally intuitive, so it may take a few minutes to locate Indian food in the "South Asian" section. It's all here, though, from any sub-category of Chinese to Uzbekistani.



2. This leads a curious eater away from the formula and predictable eateries in Manhattan to inexpensive and delicious places in outlying neighborhoods. Highly recommended.



3. We have now tried many listings in this book, and were only disappointed on one occasion (even then the food was not bad... just not noteworthy). This book has pointed out many hole-in-the-walls we've been walking past for years, like Snack on Thompson, or Soul Fixins on 34th, that were just amazing. Even in areas where we thought we had favorites (like curry hill) the recommendations in this book topped them all (Chennai Gardens). Its true there is some risk that some places might be out of business, especially in NY, but none of our attempts have found a closed shop. The only negative about this book for Manhattanites is that many listings are in the outer boroughs, but believe me, once you've experienced this book it will make you want to get on the subway.



4. I was first introduced to Robert Sietsema's excellent taste in the Village Voice, when it featured the top 100 Italian restaurants in New York City.
   
   Several amazing Italian experiences later, I knew I had to find more of his recommendations. When I stumbled across this guide, I felt as though I'd hit the jackpot. It features practically any cuisine you can think of, from Venezuelan to Tunisian with concise descriptions and suggestions of which entrees to order.
   
   The best part of the guide is that the restaurants featured are generally priced below $20 per person, a godsend in one of the most expensive cities in the world! I immediately dined at a restaurant I'd found in the guide and was bowled over by the quality and amount of food I received for the amount I paid.
   
   This is a must for any New Yorker who isn't afraid to experiment with different cuisines.



5. This book had lots of good ideas for reasonably priced places to eat in NY. A few were already out of business though. It would have also been nice to have a map to more easily find the locations. Nice reviews though.

No comments about New York Walks, 2nd (On Foot Guides).

No comments about Wallpaper City Guides Fashion Boxed Set ("Wallpaper*" City Guides).

No comments about Nature Walks of Central Park.