2 comments about Arlington National Cemetery : Shrine to America's Heroes.

1. This is by far the best text devoted to the history of Arlington national cemetery I've seen. It begins with a detailed hisory of how the Washington-Lee family aquired the property, and the government seizure during the Civil war.. The property was used as a burial ground in part to prevent Robert E. Lee family from returning. The book goes on to list numerous notables now buried there and includes a brief but informative biography of each, most have pictures of the gravesite. Finally the book lists the many memorials inside and around the cemetery and the offical requirements for burial at Arlington.. A Fascinating book, I've read it several times and find something new every time I pick it up. Well worth purchasing for the history buff, or the casual tourist who wants to learn more about our most important national shrine.



2. I first found this book in it's first edition in 1994 after a trip to D.C. After picking it up from the library, I really wished that I had it when I was in D.C. I read it from cover to cover and learned so much about Arlington. I picked up the second edition during a visit to ANC in September, 2001. Every grave marker and memorial of renown is mentioned and the history behind the larger monuments is very good. It would be really nice if color pictures accompanied the text. I hope that Mr. Peters continues to update the book every now and then.

1 comments about Oklahoma: A Portrait of America.

1. This book embodies the uniqueness of Oklahoma through colorful, emotional photos from across the state. From the Blue Whale in Catoosa to the Red Barn along old 66 in Arcadia to poignant cemetary photos, a one-of-a-kind book like no other. An excellent buy. I can't say enough great things about it.

1 comments about Lonely Planet South Pacific.

1. A typically good LP guide, but be aware that while earlier editions of the title included the whole South Pacific area, this edition does not include Micronesia. (And LP hasn't updated their micronesia guide since 2000.) So if you're planning to visit Kiribati, Palau, or other countries in Micronesia, this guide won't meet your needs.

2 comments about Touring the East Tennessee Backroads (Touring the Backroads).

1. This is a must for anyone wanting to see East Tennessee and get everything you can out of it! The book is easy to read and very informative. Maps are at the beginning of each section showing your possible journey, so you can take the entire journey or a portion and know exactly what you will find and see. The directions are excellent so you can't get lost. Now the only downfall...it is very similar to another book I purchased so don't waste your money this book has it all.



2. This and it's sister publications are some of the most detailed, informative tour guides you will find! We simply love this series and the way it is written. There are few commercial details, i.e. hotel recommendations, restaurants etc.If you need that buy the Frommer's or Fodor's books but this one will take you way off the beaten path and bring you back again much more informed than when you left. You can't go wrong with any of the books in this entire series.....I know, I have them all!

4 comments about Lighthouses of the Carolinas: A Short History and Guide.

1. I love the book! It has tons of never before seen historical images of Carolinas beacons, plus eight pages of color images. It is factual, but not dry. The author has presented the history and current condition of each of the mentioned beacons in an informative and interesting way. I live along North Carolina's coast and I never knew about a couple of our beacons. I like the maps and directions that show right where each beacon can be found. I also like the Points of Interest section at the end of each chapter that reveal other historic sites and tours that are near to the lighthouses.



2. I really enjoyed this book. The content was well-researched and presented in an organized manner. I found the subject matter very interesting without being boring. It also made me want to take a few weeks off of work to explore the coastline. I had no idea that there were so many historical lighthouses in this one area. It was also obvious that the author loves her work. The details as welll as added points of interest make this a very well rounded book. I highly recommend it! I am also looking forward to her next release.



3. This is a good, concise, accurate book. I took it with my on my travels to see the lighthouses in North Carolina. As I traveled, it was helpful in finding each lighthouse and reading about the history. It was also helpful in finding one particular lighthouse which was in a very remote location. Thanks. I recommend it highly.



4. My family is planning a trip to the North Carolina coast to visit the various lighthouses. We find this book very helpful in planning that trip. Gives lot of details on each of the lighthouses listed.

3 comments about The Ultimate Guide to Asheville & The Western North Carolina Mountains, 3rd Edition (Ultimate Guide to Asheville & Hendersonville).

1. I didn't find this book to be at all what I expected. It has alot of lists, may be more helpful for someone moving to North Carolina than visiting or vacationing.



2. This book is just a bunch of lists. It has no information that you couldn't find in the phone book. Unbelievably bad. Do not get this book



3. My husband's book is 476 pages long, and contrary to the negative reviews of the two other reviewers, it is not just a bunch of lists. Far from it, it is a comprehensive reference book, written in the format of a traditional guidebook, with commentary on restaurants, accommodations, natural and cultural attractions in the mountains, history, architecture and much more. It is proven guidebook,covering every aspect of Western North Carolina that would be of interest to visitors, and over 20,000 copies have been sold.

5 comments about PrairyErth (A Deep Map).

1. If you want to experience Kansas, with its excruitatingly boring places that slowly creep up on you and leave you blissfully satisfied and in awe of beauty; if you're willing to read long passages of flat text just to discover the beauty of burning fields; I highly recommend PrairyErth.

   I grew up in Kansas, about 2 hours from Chase county and was always facinated by the hills, the people, and just the auroa that came from Strong City and Cottonwood falls. After reading "PrairyErth" I am even more mesmorized by the locale.

   I have been out of the state for 2 years now, and long to go back. Many friends have complained about the long drives through Kansas, the flat scenery, and boring people. PrairyErth brings to life these flat lands and opens up new worlds of community and life.

   For me, reading Moon's book was much like experiencing life in Kansas. I did find some of the chapters long, dry, and dull.. but, that's how some Kansas life is. Moon always concludes these sections with a gorgeous snapshot of the land. He shows us what it is like to be in relationship with the land just as we are in relationship with one another.

   He concludes the book with a beautiful journey down the Kaw Trail.
   "How do you know when the Prairy is in you?"
   "When you see a tree as an eyesore."




2. In Blue Highways the inimitable William Least Heat Moon drove across the backroads of America. In River Horse this courageous, spiritually-venerable man floated in a barge across this nation's waterways. In Prairy Erth, he does his exploration mostly on foot. Confining himself to a microcosmic canvas, Least Heat Moon spends over 600-pages describing how he spent months delving into a single county in the heart of Kansas. Packed with maps of Chase County, its hills, waterways, roads and farmsteads, the author tells a sometimes dry but often rich story of one remote but improbably charming spot on planet earth. He meets many of the county's 3,000 residents, hears and tells of the folklore, the history, the textured layers to life in such a location. By the book's end an unknowingly begun spiritual journey reaches its conclusion, which is the way with all of William Least Heat Moon's writings. If you have the time to put into Prairy Erth, it is a compelling book that challenges the nature of individual outlook.



3. If only every county in the United States had as passionate and articulate a chronicler as William Least Heat-Moon.
   
   I came to "PrairyErth" after having read and loved "Blue Highways." This tome--though longer and less expansive, geographically--possesses many of the qualities I admired in Heat-Moon's earlier work: the narrative tone (there's none of that stuffy, impersonal, third-person prose one finds in some travelogues; the author is himself part of the story), the occasional dips into philosophy and history; the candid interviews with "locals"; and the intense search for meaning in the most ordinary of places.
   
   I have never been to Chase County, Kansas, but after spending a month or so accompanying Heat-Moon through the pages of his book, I feel as though I have. The book is subtitled "a deep map," and that is indeed what the author provides here. Square mile by square mile, the reader is introduced to the prairie, its topography and history, its residents and its wildlife. Heat-Moon correctly understands that the essence of a place is often best captured through anecdote and observation. There is nothing sweeping or grand about his narrative, and that's what makes "PrairyErth" such a delight. It's a detailed, intimate read; one almost has the feeling of looking over the author's shoulder (and back through history) as he ambles and rambles about the quadrangles of Chase County.
   
   If there's one criticism I would offer, it's that Heat-Moon sometimes lapses into needless digressions about himself and the challenges he faced while writing the book. It struck me as a bit self-absorbed--as did the occasional Faulknerian stream-of-conscious, punctuationless prose. These stylistic excesses add little to what is otherwise a magnificent and fascinating travelogue.



4. New to William Least Heat Moon, I wasn`t quite sure what to expect with Prairyerth. Having heard about the critical acclaim of Blue Highways, I thought a lesser known work would be the place to start. And I am glad I chose Praityerth.
   
   With Prairyearth, William Least Heat Moon has dug down to the heart of a specific place, in this case, the Flint Hill country of Chase County, Kansas. Not unlike Thoreau`s Walden, Prairyerth is an exhaustive chronicle of one man`s journey to the bottom--historically, geologically and geographically speaking--of one particular and rather insignificant place in the American landscape. Prairyerth, like Walden, is impossible to lump into one clean-cut literary category. Neither pure history, nor pure geology, nor `storytelling` per say, it is rather a brilliant concoction of all three. It is, as the author pens it, a `deep map` of one tiny piece of the New World. And deep it is. Least Heat Moon delves into every square inch, every prehistoric layer of his subject. The result is a stirring and fascinating ride through the discovery, settling, exploitation and ultimate destruction of the American prairie. Half Native American himself, Least Heat Moon walks through the tall grass of the American Sea with much the same spirit of his ancestors. Here was not emptiness as thought the first Europeans, but rather a vast ocean of endless natural wealth. Home to the once vast bison herds, the tall-grassed hills of Chase County were once giant mountains of the Kansas range that were slowly worn down into the Flint Hills of today. Least Heat Moon follows the tracks of the Osage and the Kansa, `people of the wind,` who traversed this area long before Zebulon Pike and John Fremont made their tentative forays across the prairie towards more secure landscapes. The author vividly captures the reverence that the Osage and Kansa held for the `prairie.` Tracking down the stories of the few remaining pure-blood Kansa, Least Heat Moon paints a metaphor for what looms in the future for us, lest we ignore the lessons of the past. Not only does the author richly expose the layer of Native Americana within Chase County, but he does justice to the natural elements of the place as well. Some of the most fascinating parts of Prairyerth are the sections on two of the county`s most enduring denizens, the Osage Orange tree/bush and the Wood Rat, aka Pack/Trade Rat. Least Heat Moon has an ultra sharp eye for interesting detail and oddity and knows how to bring such things to life.
   
   The structure of the work is as ambitious as it is groundbreaking. Every other chapter covers another quadrant of the county. Least Heat Moon spends most of his time analyzing the present inhabitants of the county, trying to distill the essence of `Kansasness.` He chats with the weathered old farmers and ranchers who`ve survived every tornado and flash flood over the last half-century and who entertain no thoughts on living anywhere else. Every voice in the county gets its chance. Feminist cattle ranchers give him the lowdown on castrating bulls, local high schoolers divulge their dreams and the regulars of the Emma Chase Cafe unload gossip unaware of who`s writing it all down. Kansasness, according to the author, is a baffling mix of progressive politics and constrictive convention. A place of often violent contrasts. Kansas was the first state born out of the fires of abolition, first to stimulate integration (Board of Education vs Topeka), yet the `n word` is still commonplace all over the county. The forefather of the county, Samuel Wood, was one of the most eloquent voices among the abolitionists, yet he stopped short of pushing for full integration. Kansas was a place where all people had freedom of opportunity (especially to better oneself economically), as long as everybody kept to his/her own. One of the first states to allow women`s suffrage, it was also one of the first to embrace Prohibition. It also kept its archaic and puritan sex laws on the books until the recent Supreme Court ruling overturned such laws.
   
   In between his quadrant explorations of the county, Least Heat Moon has interspersed chapters comprised of nothing but various epigrams and short passages regarding the state. Coming from sources as disparate as Horace Greeley and Black Elk to graffiti found at the KU library, these chapters are some of the most entertaining and enriching of the book.
   
   William Least Heat Moon is one of the greatest prose stylists I have ever encountered in modern American letters. His writing is rich with metaphor and digression, begging second and third readings of certain passages. While sometimes he expands profusely, Faulkner-like, for paragraphs, clarity is rarely forsaken. It just means reading carefully and slowly. Prairyerth is definitely a book that needs digesting. I took me almost six months to finally devour it up and when I did, I had the distinct feeling of having consumed something grand and very nutritious, albeit a bit heavy. In fact, those without persistent natures would best choose something else to read. Prairyerth is meat and potatoes and requires a lot of chewing. And perhaps that is where the work falls a tad short of its possible ancestor. Whereas one can open Thoreau`s Walden anywhere and revel in the beauty and wisdom (albeit often cryptic) found therein, Prairyerth is nothing if not taken in its entirety. Its just too dense, with too much stuff packed into its innards. In fact, a little editing could have helped the book. Some chapters are a bit superfluous and leaving them out would have only helped the work as a whole. Moreover, Least Heat Moon`s astute observations serve his examination of the natural world far better than they support his delving into the human realm. Somehow a lot of the `characters` of Chase County never fully come to life in Prairyerth. Rather, they seem two-dimensional and oddly trapped on the page. Yet, taken as a whole and for what it is, a grand archaeological and sociological dig through the layers of New World settlement, Prairyerth succeeds grandly. Never has one tiny and often ignored section of the American quilt come to life so vividly and richly as does Chase County, Kansas in Prairyerth. A place so seemingly devoid of life, is, in actuality, overflowing with the past, present and future. All you have to do is look,look carefully. The author himself says it best: `A traveler(who cannot even remotely detect the thousand-mile-an-hour spinning of the planet he rides through space at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, to say nothing of its solar and galactic movements and its precession) writes in his notebook, ~nothing is happening~. Man muses, God guffaws.` Next time you feel that nothing has ever happened or is happening now or will happen where you`re at, pick up Prairyerth and be amazed.



5. A very deep map indeed, the second of Heat-Moon's three literary tours-de-force is the story of a county in Kansas. In his first excursion, the best-selling BLUE HIGHWAYS, the author reported on a ten thousand mile sojourn along the old Federal Highways (blue on most maps). PRAIRYERTH grew out of three years of hiking, conversation and archival research in Chase County, Kansas and the result is a living history of both the particular locale and the European invasion of the west. From Knute Rockne's death in a commercial plane crash to Sam Wood's murder to Native medicine, dream walking to newspaper accounts of life on the prairie, and fossils to legends to The Land Institute where Wes Jackson explores the looming demise of the liquid fuel era, this volume casts a wide net. Heat-Moon is clear eyed enough to see the facts and then see beyond the facts to the life between the lines of old courthouse documents and pioneer diaries. He is open to less tangible subtlety as well, admitting susceptibility to hunch, daydream or the message from another's Ouija board. He tells a tale of hawks, buffalo, cowboys and beef, notes the profound damage wrought on the American prairie by McBurger mania and the possibility of recovery in a place of vast flatness and endless wind and sky. He lunches with the dead in old cemeteries and stakes out to observe life in a dying town where nothing happens. There are midnight moonlight hikes and journalistic experiments, pertinent quotes by the truckload and poignant still lifes of moments of love and loss. Such a deep map makes for a long read, but well worth the effort as pieces click into place in later chapters and a pastiche emerges, a hologram in which you can walk between the hills and dip a cupful from a clear flowing spring.

2 comments about The Viva List Latin America: 333 Places and Experiences People Love.

1. In September 2005, I filled a backpack with what I would soon learn were mostly useless items (anything white, hand sanitizer to last me a lifetime, an arm sling) and headed via red-eye from Los Angeles to Lima for a seven month solo backpacking stint all over the South American continent. With no idea what lay beyond, I spent the majority of the overnight flight with eyes wide open, examining the Peruvian businessmen sleeping all around me.
   
   When I crack open V!VA List Latin America: 333 Places and Experiences That People Love, my trip comes flooding back to me. A sense of wonder and awe pervades the pages. These passionate articles, written by Latin-American loving travelers, writers and photographers from around the world, transport me back to the countries I have explored and loved, back to the infectious rhythms danced to during Brazilian Carnaval, the flavor of a gorgeous Argentine steak, the feeling of being dwarfed by the rolling Andes of Peru and Ecuador. There is truth in these articles, history and honesty, attempts at making sense of cultures different from one's own.
   
   V!VA List Latin America is a compilation of articles submitted to Vivatravelguides.com by the website's global community. Anyone with a story to tell and a passion for travel can potentially be published, and this sense of openness and authenticity makes for a truly exhilarating read.



2. Whether you love to travel, or just love to read about it, this book will fill you with awe and wonder at the world's most amazing region. The beauty of it is that it isn't a guidebook full of hotel and restaurant listings; it's a compilation of travel stories from dozens of authors who seem to have covered every square inch of Latin America and share their favorite places. As it's written by so many travelers, the writing quality varies from pedestrian to brilliant--and typos abound--but the passion Latin America evokes shines through. I've traveled extensively in South America, but learned of new places I can't wait to experience. Bravo, Viva!

No comments about Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook.

No comments about MapEasy's Guidemap to Washington DC.