If a person is looking for a text book this is a great one. It has a lot on photos, graphics and stories. But it is for reading at a desk, not on a plane.

I like it. Now I'm going to be a Vermont Historian

This among the very few books I have experienced which combine exceptional beauty with information of urgent importance. As this volume indicates, no other state is lovelier than Vermont. Few others have a more interesting historty. But as Lyman Orton correctly indicates in the Foreword, the reader can also "take away some lessons about what determines land use, and what economic, social, cultural, and environmental consequences land-use choices may have." The reader is then urged to become involved in her or his community's efforts "to define its future, while realizing that the future's scenarios are written by today's actions." True enough. What's at stake? Examine the wealth of photographs provided in Chapter 1 and in subsequent chapters. Such natural beauty could indeed be compromised...as it has already been in so many other areas throughout the United States.

By examining the almost 400-year history of the Vermont landscape, Chapters 2-5, Albers suggests that the values of the past can be betrayed by what is done (and not done) now. Thus can the future be pre-determined, for better or worse. To have "hands on the land" is to have the power to determine its fate. That is as true of neighborhoods in the inner-city as it is of villages in Vermont. All are communities at risk.

Almost everyone will enjoy experiencing this beautiful as well as informative book. It is "must reading" for anyone involved in decisions which concern land use, and especially those decisions which have significant economic, social, cultural, and environmental consequences.

Rarely has a volume of such physical grace and beauty contained such an important and topical message. I picked up my copy after returning to Vermont for a long weekend, and found the text both forceful, dynamic and informative, artistically combined with beautiful illustrations. Not a hagiography, and avoiding the temptation to airbrush the realities of Vermont into a pastiche of the country idyll in Yankee New England, Jan Albers has created an immensely readable but intellectually rigorous study of the development and land-use choices that Vermonters have made since the Abenaki were disturbed by white settlers.

This alone would be enough to qualify "Hands on the Land" for a place on the bookshelves of students of land-use and concerned citizens in rural and semi-rural areas everywhere. That this study is so accessible and lavishly illustrated, (much in the style of the latest offerings from the OUP History of England series) commends it to the broadest possible audience. In fact, I was so taken with this that I bought two - one for my mother, a native and transplanted Vermonter, and one for me - your bookshelf will be a richer and happier place with a copy!