I thought that this was a great book and a credit to Jane Yolen! Her interweaving of historical accounts along with a bit of fantasy flair will draw readers into the book as soon as they pick it up! The wonderful harmony between fact and fiction is a winner! The story of a seemingly ordinary girl, who wept, hurt, and bled like an ordiary child becomes the goddess on Earth, also called the Anna, of the Upper Dales. The book comes complete with myths, parables, historical summaries, and for all of you out there who like music, songs complete with a score. The historical accounts can at times be dry, but are also exeedingly interesting. A winner on all acounts

this book was wonderful . i really enjoy fantasy and this was one of the best fantasy books ive read . i could not want for the sequal it kept me handing . i love this book and ive read it 8 times !

With everything this book has, it leaves me dying to find the seque!!! If you read this book, be sure to read the other books by Jane Yolen, especially the Dragon's Blood series!!!

Su libro retrata a una mujer excepcional: No solamente talentosa para el manejo hábil de un negocio dentro de una sociedad mayormente masculina, sino con un enorme sentido del humor:Yo me pateaba de risa en algunas partes, y en otras ponía mis cinco sentidos en sus sabias experiencias personales ( porque parece que ella no quiere dar consejos...lo cual me parece excelente ) Parece que la pobre se las vió negras al principio, pero a final de cuentas, a todo lo sacó provecho. Y en serio, es un libro INDISPENSABLE para cualquier mujer EN CUALQUIER PARTE DEL MUNDO, ya sea que tenga una tiendita, una empresa, una fábrica o sea funcionaria de una enorme empresa transnacional.. La verdad, aunque yo no hubiera tenido negocio, habría quedado satisfecha de leer el libro, porque es interesante, ameno y gracioso!

Te demuestra el enorme talento que tiene la mujer, y que NO ES COMO EL DEL HOMBRE...SINO ENTERAMENTE DISTINTO, MÁS AGUDO, MÁS PENETRANTE, MÁS FORTALECIDO .
Este libro NO SOLO TE DA LAS BASES MÁS TALENTOSAS PARA ADMINISTRAR UNA EMPRESA O UN NEGOCIO...sino también tips para VIVIR BIEN !

QUIERO QUE MI SEÑORA SE ENTERE DE QUE MI NEGOCIO LO
MANEJA ESTA MUJER A TRAVES DE SU MARAVILLOSO LIBRO!
Te la recomiendo, amigo..pero que no se entere su esposa!!
Son BUENAS DE CELOSAS..PERO LOS CONSEJOS ADMINISTRATIVOS DE ESTE LIBRO, LE VAN A ENCANTAR CUANDO LOS VEA CONVERTIDOS EN UN COCHE NUEVO !

It would be an injustice to call this book a photographic essay. Instead I prefer to call Alta Colombia: Splendor of the Mountains, "a work of artistic brilliance." This book is a stunning and powerful portrayal of Colombia's mountains. Unfortunately few people outside the borders of Colombia are aware of the "summits and perpetual snows that crown the great mountain range of the Andes."

To that end, Cristóbal von Rothkirch and Juan Pablo Ruiz are knowledgable environmentalists and expert mountain climbers who mangage to capture breathtaking scenes from remote areas of Colombia. We have had this book on our coffee table for years. And it always manages to get rave reviews. With the holidays coming up soon...I think it is a great gift idea.

This book is not limited to mountains. It also includes impressive frames of giant condor's, other rare birds, rocks, fields, native indians,plants and much more. "Alta Colombia: Spendor of the Mountains" is a book filled with a wide display of colors, some are soft and while others are quite bold. It also boasts some great photographs of nature's intimate relationship with the sun. Colombia is blessed with great beauty. This book captures the majestry of Colombia's natural treasures.

What a beautiful book! The pictures of the High Andes in Colombia are exquisite and moving...
By far one of my most valued books on photography from Los Andes. If you can't take a visit to the region in person, buy this book and let the spirit of Los Andes overtake you....Another excellent--although difficult to find--photography book of this region is LOS ANDES VENEZOLANOS by Gabriel Gazso.

ALTA COLOMBIA is a beautifully done book. It illustrates Colombia's magnificent countryside with a superb photographic work. Just by seeing the front page, you can tell Cristobal von Rothkirsch is an artist of great talent, but overall a being with enormous sensibility, who has been deeply in contact with the mountains'spirit. I was very lucky to meet him here in Guatemala, and have not lost hope that he may come back to climb and feel our unique volcanoes, so we can get them printed for the world to enjoy...

On my first trip to Rome, unable to read posted tourist information or afford expensive tours, I longed for in-depth historical and cultural information about the sights I was seeing. The second time I went I still had no Italian and no money, but I had a Blue Guide, and it made all the difference. This is not the most practical guidebook to use for making reservations and getting around--the sections on hotels and transportation are cursory. But once you're there, staring at that tantalizing church or monument, the Blue Guide will tell you everything you could want to know about it. Coverage of the Forum and Palatine Hill is especially good; two detailed maps and dozens of pages of text allow you to dig in and begin to understand what you're seeing. The Blue Guide also includes several pages of color maps of the city, which make a good supplement to the red-covered Pianta della Citta available from any street vendor. Overall, highly recommended.

I have been to Italy five times and I swear by the Blue Guides! I was lucky enough to get the Blue Guide Rome for Christmas, from a friend, before the first trip and I have taken that same copy every time since! From hotels to restaurants, from shopping to sightseeing, you'll find all of the important information you need to feel comfortable traveling to Rome, and more importantly, you'll feel confident as you take your daily excursions around the "eternal city". The only other book you ever need to travel around Rome is the Eyewitness Guide Rome. With those two guides, you have all the important information and pictures you'll ever need and more! I highly recommend it.

If you want to not just see but understand, appreciate and live the history which is Rome, this book is your guide. It might not provide the listing of cheap eating establishments or the best bars, but it is a travel guide and a reference book that you will continue to use long after you have left Rome.

If you really want to see Tuscany, this it: this book will take you to places you wouldn't find any other way, from charming villages that are way off the beaten track, down colorful streets and staircases to hidden piazzi that you would have walked right past, into courtyards, and out to ancient country churches with masterpieces on the altar. The Blue Guide to Tuscany is 510 pages long, plus two indexes: the author, Alta Macadam, has apparently combed every city, town and hamlet in Tuscany, traveled every road and lane, wangled her way into every locked church and described its treasures, and surveyed every provincial museum. She includes practically everything of any interest at all in the entire province of Tuscany, including the provenance of every work of art and the programs of the frescoes and carvings in every church and abbey, and notes on the contents of every museum. She gives extensive information on the architecture of Tuscany's buildings, including many floor plans, and good notes on local history. It is organized geographically, with town and city tours, and lots of maps. I heard many guides giving their talks on our visit, and very few of them had more to say about anything that Ms. Macadam or were more informative; many of the places she described exhaustively had neither guides nor tourists besides ourselves, which in Tuscany is unusual.

Her directions can be a bit cryptic at times, but if you read carefully, you'll get used to them. As in all of the Blue Guides, she is prone to understatement: when, for example, speaking of the old town in Certaldo, she says that "the upper town has considerable charm", what she means is that it is ravishingly beautiful, will charm your senses and lift your spirit, and your friends and family will envy your photos and your vacation forever.

Caveats: some people will find this guide to be overwhelming. Because it is so dense and exhaustive, use it to plan your trip before you leave or you'll be buried in minutiae and miss things you'll have wanted very much to see.

I just returned from a trip to Italy which included 4 days in Umbria and 8 days in Tuscany. I found the Blue Guides for both regions outstanding. Not surprisingly, both are quite worn (the best sign of a useful guidebook).

What makes this guidebook stand out is the incredible breadth of coverage of all tourist sites in Tuscany, making it quite thick, but not particularly heavy. (The only guide that I have seen that even comes close in terms of coverage is the Michelin Green Guide for Tuscany.) Each chapter represents a tour which covers either a town and its vicinity or a driving circuit. Within each tour, every conceivable tourist destination is identified, including small towns, churches, squares, public buildings, museums, archeological sites, etc. For significant museums and churches, the guide directs you through the works in a logical order. For the most part, individual works/objects are listed but not discussed, but notable works are identified with asterisks. Particularly remarkable works, such as Cathedrals and great fresco cycles, are discussed in more detail.

If you are interested in Italian art, architecture, and ancient history, then this book tells you where to find it in Tuscany, and provides brief descriptions. The guidebook does not teach you the history of art and architecture in Tuscany, nor should it. For this, you will need to do some additional reading.

Fine maps and a brief history are provided for each significant town. Parking advise is provided for most towns, and I strongly suggest you follow this advise. (I learned this the hard way.) Also pay close attention to the opening hours, which are quite accurate. The guide's hotel and restaurant recommendations seem quite good; they overlap significantly with the Michelin Red Guide and Frommers. Unfortunately, no descriptions or prices are provided, so most people will want another guidebook for this use. Some of the site closure information was out of date, but I expect this to be updated with the 2000 edition.

The Blue Guide series focuses on art. If you are looking for hotels, shopping, restaurants, or for entertaining reading, rely on something else. If you're looking for a serious guide to history, art, and architecture, both the well-known and the quietly tucked away, a list of hours and days open for musuems, holidays (often to be avoided!), as well as addresses of libraries and research insitutions, the Blue Guides are for you. They cover almost every artwork in the various regions, and do so accurately. The books guide the reader systematically through churches and museums and include accurate floor plans. Towns are grouped into touring areas, as are neighborhoods in the large cities. Town maps, even for little places, are plentiful and precise, even for the winding streets of Siena. City maps, such as Florence, are equally precise and inclusive, but they are split among several pages, which can make them harder to follow --- a minor flaw. I use Blue Guides as a textbook for my college students, and I never go to Italy without at least one!

I have loved traveling to Egypt for years and have devoured everything decent I can find to read about this country and its people. If you want to understand the Egyptians this volume is one good place to start.

This is the second edition of one of the finest summations of ancient Egyptian civilization ever written for the general reader. Not only is this an exellent introduction to many aspects of Egypt, it is a visual delight. The maps, especially, configure in the reader's mind spacial relationships and their cultural implications. Other illustrations of temple precincts and related architectural elements of Egyptian life supplement the excellent writing, written for, but never "down to" non-specialists. If I were to own only one reference work on ancient Egypt, this would be the one.

Gateway To Alta California: The Expedition To San Diego, 1769 by writer, photographer, and historian Harry W. Crosby is the story of the first land journey to San Diego undertaken by Europeans in 1769. Crosby draws upon original sources such as the journals of Padre Juan Crespi, Joseph deCanizares (Captain Rivera's official scribe), Padre Junipero Serra, and Gaspar de Portola, as well as recreating the overland trek himself (literally on foot and muleback) to map out the original and historic route that went through the then unexplored, unknown, desolate wilderness of northern Baja California to found the community of San Diego. A strongly recommended addition to California Historical Studies reference collections, Gateway To Alta California also lists the names of the Hispanic members of this historic expedition party.

I don't usually like History books, because they always feel like reading homework. A friend bought this book for me and I didn't think I was going to be interested--but I was! What a great adventure story--as interesting as Lewis and Clarke or Captain Cook's stories of discovery. I didn't know anything about this expedition, and I've lived in California all my life. I highly recommend this to people who like a good adventure book with some interesting history.

Girl Wonder is the winner of a 2003 Parents Choice Gold Award. As a teacher and parent, I rely on the Parents Choice award books. This is a great book to read aloud. If your daughter plays ball, read her this book. The photograph of the real Alta Weiss on the back cover is awesome.

My daughter began playing ball in third grade. She loves this book. The illustrations are fun yet convey a sense of the time period. And the story is great for reading aloud. The best part is seeing a photograph of the real Alta Weiss, the Girl Wonder, on the back cover. That seems to make it real for kids. I am a teacher and I do a unit on women's history every March and will definitely include Girl Wonder on my list of books to read to my students.

Part history and part dreamy reminiscence, this book is an account of a boy growing up in Southwest Saskatchewan in the early part of the 20th Century. The central portion of the book is pure history, and the long chapters on cowboys are particularly challenging because they require an intimate knowledge of cowboy terminology. Stegner does not mince words about the difficulties of life on the plains--extremes of heat and cold, wind, hostile topography, lack of cultural amenities--the result of which is that most who grew up there moved elsewhere. But he also shows a passionate attachment for the country of his childhood. The narrative often seems rambling because, like James Michener, the author tries to incorporate so much besides history--including the biology and geology of the nearby Cypress Hills, the biologically diverse area nearby--and even his poetic musings have elements of fact, as when he describes the wind, or the gophers, or his swimming hole, or his school, or his family's homestead, or the problems involved in the town's incorporation.

This wonderful collection of essays and fiction about the last Western frontier is both romance and anti-romance. Writing in the 1950s, Stegner captures the breath-taking beauty of the unbroken plains of southwest Saskatchewan and the excitement of its settlment at the turn of the century. Part memoir, the book recounts the years of his boyhood in a small town along the Whitemud River in 1914-1919, the summers spent on the family's homestead 50 miles away along the Canadian-U.S border. His book is also an account of the loss of that Eden and the failed promise of agricultural development in this semi-arid region with thin top soil.

Stegner is a gifted, intelligent writer, able to turn the people and events of history into compelling reading. The opening section of the book describes the experience of being on the plains and specifically in the area where Stegner was a boy. And it lays out the geography of that land -- a distant range of hills, the river, the coulees, the town -- which the book will return to again and again.

The following section evokes the period of frontier Canada's early exploration, the emergence of the metis culture, the destruction of the buffalo herds, the introduction of rangeland cattle, and then wave upon wave of settlement pushing the last of the plains Indians westward and northward. A chapter is devoted to the surveying of the boundary along the Canada-U.S. border; another chapter describes the founding of the Mounted Police and its purely Canadian style of bringing law and order to the wild west.

The middle section of the book is a novella and a short story about the winter of 1906-1907. In the longer piece, eight men rounding up cattle are caught on the open plains in an early blizzard. Stegner builds the drama and the peril of their situation artfully and convincingly. The final section of the book returns to Stegner's memories of the town and the homestead, ending with his family's departure for Montana.

Stegner lived at a time and in a place where a person born in the 20th century could still experience something of the sweep of history that transformed the American plains. I've read many books about the West, and because of his depth of thought, his gifts as a writer, and his unflinching eye, Stegner's work ranks for me among the best. I heartily recommend this book.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Wallace Stegner grew up on the prairie frontiers of North Dakota, Saskatchewan, and Montana, and in the mountains of Utah. As is indicated by the subtitle, this volume combines history, a memoir, and historical fiction. Readers who have spent significant time on the snow swept northern steppes may find a small part of themselves, and of this land, in Wolf Willow. ...
"On those miraculously beautiful and murderously cold nights glittering with the green and blue darts from a sky like polished dark metal, when the moon had gone down, leaving the hollow heavens to the stars and the overflowing cold light of the Aurora, he thought he had moments of the clearest vision ... In every direction ... the snow spread; here and there the implacable plain glinted back a spark - the beam of a cold star reflected in a crystal of ice." (The scene evokes in me a powerful memory, as I recall often standing alone on just such "murderously cold" snow blanketed prairies and gazing into those "miraculously beautiful" night skies.)

An enjoyable tale of adventure in one of the most beautiful areas on the planet. Readable and enjoyable.

Mr. Marty's first book should be required reading for anyone venturing into the resplendent Rocky Mountains of Canada. His vivid style and humourous, at times startling, observations are in themselves worth the effort. Mr. Marty's book will leave you with fond memories of places few of us have visited. As a result the reader may begin craving a visit to this superlative domain. Bravo! It is worth mentioning that his second book, "Leaning on the Wind", is marvelous and insightful as well. He is a true Albertan treasure...

I read this book on a camping trip in the Kananaskis. I looked forward to my lunch breaks on a rock by a lake or at the top of a rock scree so that I could continue my reading.

Marty takes you with him as he explores and cares for his territory. He teaches you what he can, but the lessons only sneak up on you...like the time I rounded a corner on a narrow trail and found myself face to face with a moose and her calf...'never get between a grizzly and her cub, that's when you're in trouble'...the lesson seemed applicable in this case, so I slowly made my way past rather than reaching for my camera.

I find I value the parks much more after reading Marty's book and hope for their future.