First Footsteps in East Africa or an Exploration of Harar Review

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(More customer reviews)Sir Richard F Burton is one of the most famous of unread authors. Nearly everyone can tell you about his scandalous doings with native women, his marriage to an ultra-Catholic Englishwoman, and the latter's destruction of the author's private papers after his death.
Ever since I read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography, THE DEVIL DRIVES, I have collected some 20 different Burton books and read most of them. If you make allowances for Burton's diabolical thoroughness (involved footnotes, appendices, foreign language quotes, tables, etc.) and his Victorian circumlocutions in dealing with taboo subjects, he is a truly wonderful read.
Although FIRST FOOTSTEPS is not his most famous book, it is probably the best one to start with. The action is not only more focussed, but Burton did feel he needed quite so much of a scholarly carapace to report back to the scholarly organizations back in Britain. And it finishes up with a stirring postscript about an attack on Burton's camp by Somalis in which the author barely escaped with his life.
Perhaps this is a book that Presidents Bush and Clinton should have read before committing U.S. troops to the region: Burton shows us that not much has changed in the region in 150 years. He was in constant danger, and survived only because his knowledge and guts were more than an a match for his enemies.
This is an exciting book and deserves to be better known.

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Subjects: Horn of Africa -- Description and travelNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Refuge Review

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(More customer reviews)Those who are lucky to know Dot Jackson's writing as a journalist and columnist have long awaited this, her first novel, and she does not disappoint. Luminously written, evocative, and filled with a deep love for her Appalachian roots, Refuge is a new American masterpiece. You will be homesick for the Carolina Hills even if you have never been there.
Damon Lee Fowler, author of Damon Lee Fowler's New Southern Baking

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Late one night in the spring of 1929, a young Charleston society matron named Mary Seneca Steele goes to bed while considering what to wear for her suicide. Now, suddenly seized by an other worldly fiddle tune playing in her head, she arises, steals her children and her husband's new Auburn Phaeton, and sets out on a journey of enlightenment, which begins with learning to drive.

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Horses, Hitches, and Rocky Trails Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a repurchase of an old friend. Years ago my career and life took me to Wyoming. Like many, I fell in love with the high country and soon realized that the only way to get to the best of it was with horses. As a relative greenhorn, however, I had a lot to learn about getting to and living in the high country, with or without horses. A friend gave me Joe Back's book Horses, Hitches and Rocky Trails. Somewhere along the way, I misplaced it. I'm glad to have it back.
This book is more than informative. It delivers all its name suggests, telling all I needed to know about the tack, rigging and techniques of handling horses in a pack string. By simply following his advice, I found myself not only able to do it, but do it without embarassing myself in the company of real mountain men.
Beyond that, Joe's earthy narrative and humorous, but informative, illustrations make the book a joy to read. Even after you read it cover to cover, you'll want to spend some time looking at the illustrations and re-reading the tidbits of wisdom. If you have an interest or plan to go into the primitive areas of the mountain West, I encourage you to read this even if you never intend to pack a horse yourself.

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"Horses, Hitches and Rocky Trails" is oftenreferred to as the packer's bible. Written in the language of theWest, it is a complete and often humorous presentation of the methodof packing horses into the wilderness. Amplified by the brilliantdrawings of artist Joe back, the book is for both the amateur andprofessional packer.

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An Outdoor Family Guide to Lake Tahoe (Outdoor Family Guides) Review

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(More customer reviews)PROS: The organization of this book is outstanding. It has an overview map with location of each hike clearly marked by its number. It has a table of hikes with difficulty ratings, length, usage, and activities. It has brief summary of how to handle high altitute, ticks, bears, and mosquitos, and what to put into the backpack for a hike. Each hike comes with a little individual map. Each trail is rated as suitable for hiking, biking, or both. 58 trails described in the book is a very manageble number which makes choosing the right one easy. It is quite well described what to expect during the hike. It is the best organized book on hikes I have ever seen!!!
CONS: the information in the book is not always up-to-date; small details which could help you to find trailhead or the right turn are often not there; maps appear to be traced from topographic maps and are accurate, but show very little besides the trail and starting and final points. Very mathematical approach requires meticulous counting of distances.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: we took this book for a two-day weekend at Tahoe. On our first day, we decided to take trail #6 to Watson Lake. The book suggests taking unpaved Watson Lake Road and turn left on road 16N73C in 5.9 miles. In reality it turned out that the road is called "Mt. Watson Rd.", that it is paved for at least 12 miles, that there are quite a few roads on the left, but none of them has sign "16N73C". There are no hints in the book how to find the right road other than distance from the highway, and we of course did not realize that the distance was the only way to find that road. We were looking for a sign, missed the 5.9 miles reading, and then wasted 2 hours driving back and forth, but did not find the turn to the lake and gave up.
On the next day, we went for #16, Five Lakes Trail. The book suggests to drive on Alpine Meadows Road for 2.1 miles to the trailhead which is opposite to Deer Park Drive. We found Deer Park Drive 1.6 miles from the beginning of the road, were confused by why it is not 2.1 miles down the road, thought that perhaps it was a typo in the book, and spent 15 minutes looking for the trail - until we asked a local who told us that Deer Park Drive is a half-loop which intersects Alpine Meadows Road twice, here and half a mile down the road.
In both cases, we got a good deal of frustration. I will not repeat here what my wife said about this book and what she suggested to do with it! A good map could certainly help us - but we did not have one, and the maps in this book do not show anything except for the countour of the trail and the final destination - as a rule, neither landmarks along the trail nor intersecting trails are indicated.
BOTTOMLINE: If your family enjoys hiking with a GPS unit and a topographic map and loves the idea of counting 3.1 miles along the road, then another 2.7 miles after a turn, and you never forget to reset your trip meter after a turn when you are driving - you will get the most from this book and will love it. On the other hand, if you like to rely on verbal descriptions more than on accurate numbers and want a book that warns you that there are two crossings with Deer Park Drive and you should park at the upper one, or expect the book to describe what you will see when you arrive to an important turn to make you feel safe that you did not miss it, or if you like to see detailed maps or even fragments of topographic maps on one of the pages - then you may find this book very frustrating because the language it talks to you is not the language you expect to hear. It seems that instructions were very carefully verified against the map - but were not necessarily checked by real-life family hikers! A few more touches could've made this book really great. Maybe I was unfortunate to choose poorly described trails, or was not a kind of hiker that this book was written for - but I got my share of frustration which could be easily prevented by just several words in the text. My advise - if you get this book, carefully track the distances, expect that some things written in the book do not match the reality, and keep a topographic map at hand - and you'll be fine.

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Across the High Lonesome Review

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(More customer reviews)Molly Mendoza has just graduated from Cal Poly with her teaching certificate, ready for marriage to finance Scott Campbell and a life in the yuppie mainstream. That is, until she walks in on Scott with her best friend Shelly. Young and heartbroken, Molly has never really thought about any life outside the one she had planned.
During a job fair, Molly had casually filled out an application for Granite Creek Pack Station. Now, after a call from part-owner Don Davidson, Molly is surprised to find herself heading up the Owens valley for summer employment as a cook for Granite Creek, a far cry from settling in with a classroom filled with third-graders.
Don is one-third owner along with the curmudgeonly Ike Steel and his veterinarian daughter Joyce. Molly has no time to think about her decision as she is swept off the very next day on a weeklong packing trip along the Golden Trout Trail. And so her adventuresome summer begins.
'Across The High Lonesome' covers one summer with the Granite Creek Pack Station, and is full of adventure, laughs, tears, romance, scuffles, disputes, and ornery mules. Although this book is outside my normal genre of reading, I enjoyed this book every bit as much as I did 'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurty. Like 'Lonesome Dove', 'Across The High Lonesome' is a story about people and their capacity for growth, along with their eccentricities.
The activities of this closely knit group of folks, Molly, Don, Ike, Joyce, Dwight, Jake, Pete, Tad, Trina, Kate and Bill, Burt, Nancy, Joe, and the entire rest of the gang will keep you reading long into the night, wondering what they have in store for you next. There is almost a soap opera quality here, as there is within any small company that is not held by the restraints of the civilized world. The all-too-human crew blends in with the wild background and make for a lovely picture, and an intriguing tale.
Brumfield pulls no punches, this is life at its grittiest, wildest, and most serene. The characters are all too human, fully fleshed and irascible, down to the individual personalities of the animals. The reader can tell, though this is a work of fiction, that the author knows this wilderness and these trails quite well, the injection of realism is too poignant to miss.
Do yourself a favor and google images from some of the places mentioned in this book, such as Mono Creek, Summit Lake, Pioneer Basin, and Shepherd's Pass. Brumfield's descriptions of the surrounding landscapes only cement his ability to make the wilderness landscapes bloom through his written words. It's magnificent country!
Though there are some early instances of repetitiveness in Brumfield's prose, these are rapidly overlooked by the richness of the tale being told. I really cannot recommend this book highly enough, I wound out being so absorbed by it that I almost wanted to mount a mule and go riding myself. Definitely a 'buy'. Enjoy!


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Across the High Lonesome is a modern western odyssey that invites the reader to hitch a ride through the glacial carved vales and over the high lonesome passes of California's -Range of Light.+A journey of love, pain and adventure, brimming with unforgettable characters, salty humor, and recalcitrant mules.Brumfield has taken a lifetime of experience packing dudes into the mountains and distilled it into a delightful work of fiction.

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Princess Academy Review

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(More customer reviews)"So what won the Newbery this year?"
"Criss Cross by Lynn Rae Perkins".
"Uh-huh. Is it any good?"
"Yep. It's nice".
"So what else got awards?"
"Well, there was something called Whittington by Alan Armstrong, Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson, Hitler Youth by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, and of course The Princess Academy..."
"The PRINCESS Academy? Oh, ick, yuck, puke!"
"...by Shannon Hale. You've read it?"
"Well...no, not exactly. But how good could anything called The Princess Academy be?"
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a rough equivalent of several conversations I've had with various people in regards to Shannon Hale's latest little nugget of gold. Say the words "Princess Academy" to the well-read and instantly their faces scrunch up and either the word "ew" or the word "ugh" emits from their lips. Ask them if they've read the book themselves and you'll undoubtedly get a quick shake of the head. It isn't the actual book they don't like. It's the title. I imagine there must have been some long conversations over at Bloomsbury Children's Books when this title was proposed. On the one hand, if you put the word "Princess" in a title you can link it the oh-so profitable "Princess Diaries", Disney "Princess" line, and even the "Royal Diaries" line of books. On the other hand, you're going to lose numerous parents, educators, librarians, masculine readers, and other members of society who take one look at the title and brush it off. I gave the book a long hard look before I plunged into it. This I admit freely. And while I wouldn't go handing it silver medals just for existing, it's certainly an intelligent and well-written little story that's bound to be adored by fans of Hale's previous "The Goose Girl", not to mention Gail Carson Levine's, "Ella Enchanted".
It is a well-known fact that Mira is useless. That is to say, it's well-known to Mira. Every day she wants to go off and work in the quarry with all the other village girls so that she can contribute something to her little mountain village. And every day her father refuses to let her set even one toe near the quarry lines. Short for her age with little to do but speak to her sister Mara and her old childhood friend Peder, fourteen-year-old Mira is mired in her own shame when who should appear in the village but a representative from the king himself. It seems that the prince is in need of a bride. Sounds simple. Unfortunately the royal priests have declared that the woman chosen will have to be from Mira's tiny mining village. Which means, of course, that an academy must be set up for the ladies ASAP. Before any of the girls know it, they've been whisked off to study under the harsh tutelage of one Olana Mansdaughter. Far from her home and her previous assumptions, Mira thrives in an atmosphere of entirely new knowledge. Yet as she grows more self-aware, it becomes perfectly clear to all of the girls that only one of them will earn the prince's favor. And Mira does not entirely want it to fall onto her.
I just read the bookflap of my copy to figure out whether or not the bookflap writer (oh most unrewarding of jobs) had a better grasp on showing you some of the book's subtleties. No such luck. Rereading my own summary, the book sounds kind of cutesy. I despise the term "girl power" to the marrow of my bones, but this is certainly a tale of empowerment, no question. And telepathy. Empowerment and telepathy. We're in fairy tale country here, but aside from the occasional I-can-speak-to-you-through-the-rocks moment, the story is straightforward and sensible. Hale keeps her characters and emotions on a tight reign, never giving away too much or allowing too little. Attentive readers will probably guess at the prince's choice long before Mira does, but for others it will come as a pleasant and well-crafted little surprise. As a heroine, Mira herself undergoes the necessary growth and changes required of her. At the same time, she has a sense of humor. The book doesn't go in for many laugh out loud moments, but at least we're not watching a humorless EARNEST hero in the making.
I'm just waiting for the review of this book that decries it to be a Communist screed (which, obviously, it isn't but Amazon.com reviewers love making that accusation). You see, the girls often work as a whole to beat their enemies when they can't do it singly. They form a kind of insipient princess union so that their professor will lay off the harsh punishments and give them their basic human rights. It works like gangbusters (due in no little way to some fancy negotiating) and is a lovely little lesson in sticking together against a common enemy. The book also shows how a village that is seemingly doing well for itself can still benefit from a good education. In some ways, "The Princess Academy" is so practical in its system of checks and balances that you forget that the places mentioned in this tale don't actually exist. Hale excels at selling you an entirely new reality.
Chalk this book up to a nice little surprise. If you were to grab me by my lapels and demand whether this book should have gotten a Newbery Honor or "Each Little Bird That Sings", I would of course indicate the latter. But since "Little Bird" did NOT win and "Princess Academy" did, don't go scoffing at this book sight unseen. Bad titles aside, Hale has conjured up a nice little story and a worthy addition to any and all library systems.

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