No doubt about it - You can't afford NOT to have this book!
The descriptions are great, the tips are sometimes life-saving, and the thought and planning that went into this book is spectacular!

I know guidebooks. Retired in 1994, I now spend much time traveling with my canoes, mountain bike, and backpack. I have explored much of the western states, Alaska, and of course, living in North Carolina, the eastern states. Many of these expeditions were done solo with only a guidebook as a companion. My bookshelves are full of guidebooks. And I have found them to be a mixed blessing. Though valuable as a source of places to go, depending solely on the information contained in the guidebook can lead to some unexpected surprises, which is never a good thing in unknown territory.

It is therefore a pleasure to have a guidebook published that is accurate, descriptive, and contains virtually all the information needed to choose, plan, and implement a successful river trip, whether whitewater or flatwater. And did I say accurate?

I had the pleasure of accompanying Mr. Ferguson on many of his explorations for this book. It took me awhile to adjust to stopping on the river while he noted each unusual feature, alternate put-in, height of the banks, and seemingly every house into his ever-present tape recorder. God knows how many batteries he went through in his GPS. And the shuttles were always fun as we held up traffic while finding and double-checking each road name and number. But the end result is a guidebook that can be depended on to be correct in the mileage and the maps, which, by the way, are by far the best maps I have ever seen in any guidebook. I also have to say that Paul Ferguson is a delightful person to be with on any trip, even when unexpectedly stuck overnight in the middle of a swamp.

This book contains many unusual details that are not found in other guidebooks. One example is instead of giving each section of river a single rating for scenery, Ferguson breaks the section into two-mile segments and then gives a percentage of what is found in that section (i.e. A80%, B20%) which gives a much better picture of what will be encountered. Another example is that noteworthy features along the way are given with the mileage where thay will be seen.

With 469 pages of well thought out and sometimes painfully gained information, I think this book is an incredible value at only $19.95!

I have been reading this book for the last two days and am impressed with the detail of the trips, location of put ins, highways, mileage and other details that the author has added. I have paddled one third to one half of the rivers he describes and know the information to be accurate. A truely up to date book for anyone who likes to paddle these rivers.

This guide, like others in the Cadogan's range is chock full of information, and not photos. If you are looking for maps (other than a Metro and RER railway map inside the back cover and the walking maps) and colour pictures you are advised to look elsewhere.

After opening chapters looking at 'Paris in a Weekend' ,practicalities, history, art and architecture and several short pieces on topics such as dog poo and modernism (well worth reading - very entertaining, but make sure your spectacles prescription is up to date - the print in this section is very small!), the guide really gets into its strength.

The bulk of the book is built around 11 different walks, in 11 different neighbourhoods. All are thoroughly described with an accompanying easy-to-follow black and white map. Each walk has an indication of how long it will take (excluding museum visits), suggestions for restaurants and cafes on the route and comprehensive information on the sites.

This makes the book perfect for a visitor spending an extended time in Paris, who wants to discover the city the best way possible, or for the repeat visitor who has the good fortune to be able to return to Paris time and again.

After the Walks, the museums of Paris are listed and cross-referenced to where they occur in the Walks text. The Louvre and Musee d'Orsay are described at length. A section then follows on peripheral attractions - lying further afield than central Paris. There are listings for restaurants, accommodation and nightlife venues.

The writing in Cadogans tends towards the opinionated, witty, slightly ironic (but not smart-alec) and drily understated British style. It appeals to me in the same way as Rough Guides do.

This is not a book for the first-time short-term visitor intending to see the "Top Five" and then move on. There are plenty of other guides catering to that market, and fulfilling their brief admirably (try Rick Steves, Let's Go, Frommer, Lonely Planet for example). But if you want a book with some substance and detail which will be just as rewarding a read back at your hotel as accompanying you on your on-foot rambles around this beautiful city, then I can't recommend it highly enough.

Opinionated, controversial, occasionally intolerant, sometimes jarringly critical, but always possessing at heart a deep affection for the city, this guide will point your gaze towards places people, places and events that may well be unknown to the majority of born and bred Parisians.

It is deeply learned, but never stuffy, memorably describing the decor of one church and "cold potatoes", the descriptions on the walks ensure that once you arrive at a given site, you are aware of its historical and architectural context.

Previous reviewers have referred to the guided walks in the book, and these are indeed its jewel. It will absolutely make so much more of your time in Paris than you could have believed possible if you make the effort to follow as many of them as you can. They are not arduous treks, they can be leisurely strolls and the book makes sure that you know the very best places to stop an eat (or drink) on the way.

Buy the book, read the history (also humourous, but quite bloody) on the way, use it whilst there, and relive your Parisian peregrinations on the way back by rereading the walks you had a chance to follow.

You will want to go back

The walking tours in this book are incredible. Fun, interesting, perfect directions (even for those of us who are directionally challenged!). The history, art, architecture sections are also well worth reading and opinionated just enough to make them truly interesting and unique. I plan on buying as many other travel books by this couple as I can find.

The first time I came across Pete Seeger was at a peace in at Flushing Meadow Park. Here I am thirty years later sharing Pete Seeger story with my children. There are not many artist I can say that about. Some thing about Pete makes me feel good about life. Get his CD's and this book and share them with your family. Your world will be a richer place.

Another truly wonderful contribution from our old companion on the trail, Pete Seeger. Thank you, Pete!

The storytelling tips and lead ins are interesting and quite charming. The best thing about this book, however, is the great stories.

Every evening my son walks out of his room with the book hidden behind his back and a big grin on his face. He holds it up in front of me and asks "ready?" We absolutely LOVE this book!

Even though this book is out of print, you should own a copy, it is so emotional and heartwarming, after I read this book about Edie and her husband and the experiences she went through with him, I had to write her a email and tell her about how well I enjoyed this book, she wrote me back with a response and said she was working on a new book, this was a year or so ago and I am still waiting. I can't wait. I hope her new book is as great as this one.

I had no idea what this story would be about when I picked it up, but once I started reading I knew I wasn't going to be able to put it down. I read it in a day, and couldn't believe how profound this story was. By the time I was finished, I wanted to hold my husband and not let him go. In a world where we all tend to focus on big homes, big cars, big jobs, big money, etc., the simple thread that wove through this wonderful story was the simple love that Edie found with Paul. Paul may have been a simple man, but I wonder how many of us in our lifetimes ever feel the true love and tenderness that they shared. This is a story that I will always remember. I truly hope I precede Edie to heaven so I can witness their reunion.

I have never before felt the urge to write to an author to tell her how much I enjoyed her beautifully written book. I was touched very much by this story and highly recommend it.

Shaffer is a gifted poet, generously allowing us to see the world from his sometimes tilted (like a pinball machine) but generally optimistic viewpoint. His verse is accessible without being simple, and often cheerful but not sappy. And it comes with instructions! If you like your poetry dense as ancient fruitcake and studded with indigestible pellets of unidentifiable allusions you may not enjoy this book, but I found it refreshing and strongly recommend it.

Portable Planet is that rare book of poetry that gives you both immediate pay-off and a lifetime of contemplation. From the opening poem, "At Play in the Fields of the Word," Eric Paul Shaffer makes you laugh ("None come to the door but grim vendors of an angry God and trademark plasticware") and makes you think ("Today, I define 'freedom' this way: with nothing done, the future is full"). Each of Shaffer's poems hits you with power and precision. Shaffer has more to SAY than any other living poet I've read. Unlike most acclaimed (and rather boring) poets, he never hides behind safely ambiguous imagery; his voice is loud and clear, and playfully challenging. For example, consider this line from his long poem "The Western Room:" "From Japan, America is the land of the rising sun, inscrutable." From his poem "Yadokari: Hermit Crab, Okinawa," you can also learn how to live your life: "Life is kind. Move on. Carry what you can." If I were forced to choose my favorite, I'd pick "On the Verge of the Usual Mistake." (His titles alone are both funny and thought-provoking.) If you buy only one book of poetry this year, make sure you buy Portable Planet. It doesn't get better than this.

Portable Planet liberates American poetry from the stuffiness of the Academy and the silliness of the Slam. Here is a book whistling with fresh air, open vistas, and good humor. Portable Planet should be made into our next National Park, but hurry and get your copy, before the next administration sells it off! If Walt Whitman had looked under his own boot soles, he would have found Eric Paul Shaffer--and Shaffer would have been giving old Walt a hot foot. This book burns!

What is so memorable about Paul Harvey's stories is the impact with which one is left long after having read the peice.

His is a perspective which simultaneously realizes the innocence and the experience of the human character. A snapshot of both our potential and our pain. And it is this acceptanece, a simplistic understanding, that allows the essence of the situation to remain with the reader. Thus, initially, the reader must be trusted by the author to be capable of that understanding.

This is Harvey's talent: to assume and place before an audience not only the humanity of his subject, but also of themselves.

I read this book about 15 years ago and was delighted to find it on amazon. This is a keeper, one that you can browse through over and over again. It contains stories of little known aspects of the lives of very well known people and is rather like an encyclopaedia based on People magazine. The element of surprise at the end gives a delightful twist to each story.

As Napoleon indicated, History is the lies upon which we've all agreed. There is no such thing as a work of history that doesn't leave some important element out. Partly that's to make history more palatable for a new generation -- who really wants to know about dentistry in the Colonial era when we're reading about George Washington and his false teeth? No matter what the reason, though, once an item is left out of history it tends to disappear permanently.

Unless Paul Harvey Jr. gets his hands on it.

Paul Harvey Jr, who writes the short vignettes for his father's radio show "The Rest of the Story," has a gift for uncovering forgotten facts. Did you know there was another Three Stooges? Did you know Jack Benny was invited to join the Marx Brothers? Did you know one of our Founding Fathers kept his wife chained in the basement because of persistent congenital madness? I hadn't known that.

This book is an incomplete collection of Harvey's vignettes for his father's show. Some are published under the name "Paul Aurendt," and if you can find them, jump on them with both feet. However, this book provides a good primer for the forgotten corners of history, and also allows you to own copies of the vignettes Harvey has made famous over the last 25 years. One can only hope that Harvey's example will inspire more historians to investigate the forgotten corners of history and find what's been otherwise forgotten. I'd buy more of these books if more of them were available.

While I wouldn't consider myself a "paperweight" fan, I admire Paul Stankard's work immensely.

For so long I've wondered, "how does he accomplish such wonderful things?". This book cannot show his unique genius nor how his imagination works, but it does show just enough of his techniques to sate my never ending curiosity.

You can see how a thistle is built. There are gorgeous pictures of how a glass bee is build and attached to a honey comb. Here are the dragonflies, the orchids and those amazing root people!

The book is filled with full color pictures, and many wonderful detail views. In Paul Stankard's case, "God is in the details".

I admired Paul Stankard's work before I read this book. I admire his ability ever so much more now that I've seen the immesurable detail that goes into each piece.

Filled with beautifully detailed photographs of Paul Stankard's paperweights as well as excellent closeups of the making of his flowers and other paperweight inclusions. It also includes an interesting background on Paul's career and philosophy, but the multitude of wonderful color photographs of his extraordinary work are what make this book truly special.

You will not be able to stop the "oohs" and "aahs" . The artist has developed a style unlike anyone else and the photographs are so detail you feel like you have become part of the piece. A work of art in and of itself.

Dr. Rapport has written an excellent and readable story about one of the most influential figure in modern medicine. At the same time that he has told us a facinating story about Dr. Beeson's life, he has explained some of the history of medicine during the 20th century. A wonderful book of interest to doctors and patients; here is hope for the medical profession.

With great writing skill and a deep understanding of his subject, Dr. Rapport has managed to capture the essence of the life of one of the most influential doctors of the age. At the same time, the book describes many of the major clinical developments in medicine over the past one hundred years. A fine book that will interest not only doctors, but their patients as well.

I was a resident training under Dr.Beeson during his tenure as Chairman of Medicine at Yale. Many of those quoted in the text are old friends and colleagues. The qualities they describe, I can assure any reader, are not exaggerated. This is a compelling and readable account of a great man. Rapport has come close to identifying his essence. This is must reading for anyone trying to understand what makes a supremely good physician in a society undergoing profound social and complex technologic changes.

Political Pilgrims is the amazing story of how Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. The book relates how cultural and religious leaders from the West, including familiar names, visited the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist countries, and told the most appalling lies to flatter their hosts and express their contempt for Western society. It is quite an education, as another reviewer put it. Marx's revolutionary myth dominated history for the better part of the 20th Century, and if we are serious about not repeating the errors of that period, this book should be a part of our education. The short story Buddha's Smile in Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece, The First Circle, brilliantly tells the same story, from the point of view of Soviet prisoners. Lewis Feuer's Marx and the Intellectuals compares Marx and Engels themselves with the kind of people Hollander is describing. I also recommend the writings of the Rumanian philosopher, pastor, and former prisoner, Richard Wurmbrand.

Hollander retells George Keenan's story of a Norwegian radical who, when asked what country he most admired, said, "Albania." Keenan noted that the student obviously knew nothing of Albania, but chose that country "simply because it seems to be a club with a particularly sharp nail at the end of it with which to beat one's own society."

The same reactionary psychology has, it seems to me, been transferred in our day to an uncritical and naive attraction towards what is (simplistically) called "eastern religion." One could write an even longer book about how Westerners project their fantasies on monist ideologies: people like Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong "explaining" human sacrifice, the Theosophical Society standing up for caste, Arthur C. Clarke (Did he know much more of Asian history than the Albanian radical knew of Albania?) describing Buddhism as "the only faith that never became stained with blood." Even Hollander allowed that, "While the suspension of disbelief has its place in human life, it belongs more to the religious (or asthetic) than the political realm." But his book should be read, in my opinion, as a warning against all forms of ideological naivite. A love of truth, and a determination to tell it no matter how out of fashion it may seem, is essential to integrity in all walks of life. Political Pilgrims vividly illustrates, in the political realm, the evil that can be done when honesty plays second fiddle to fashion.....

Hollander puts the selective moral outrage and selective acceptance of evidence of the Left on parade as he follows these blinkered one's through the various Potemkin Villages of the Totalitarians, from the October revolution forward into most of the 20th century. Smug arrogance knows no political party or religious faith, no gender, race or sexual preference, it seems to be evenly spread among us. In this instance the highly developed capacity for self-deception of the Left is on trial and an amusing trial at that. Their tortured explanations of the intellectually unexplainable are a fictive of mankind's marvelous ability "to transform things to the liking of his desires".

Like all those who are "blowin' in the wind", these intellectual hard heads do not seek truth, but instead to validate their worldview. This book is a study of intellectuals, estrangement and its consequences.

Hollander has written a remarkable work of cultural history, documenting western misperceptions of revolutionary societies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has observed, it is one of the characteristics of a liberal democracy that it is politically unexciting compared with the messianic political creeds. Hollander substantiates this truth with a depressingly predictable, horrifying, but still grimly funny catalogue of intellectual gullibility concerning the supposed virtues of a succession of Communist despotisms, from the early Bolshevik state to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. It is perplexing that this type of support for totalitarianism of the Left has not always - or even often - destroyed the reputation of the 'intellectual' professing it. One has only to think of the deserved obloquy heaped upon supporters of the equivalent monstrous tyrannies of the Right - Ezra Pound's sympathy with Fascist Italy, Heidegger's support for Nazism - to note an unwarranted inconsistency here. The preposterous encomium "Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation" (thus titled in its second edition, without a question mark), defending Stalin and the Moscow trials, has done little to dent the reputation of Sidney and Beatrice Webb as reforming advocates of Fabian socialism, while Noam Chomsky's repulsive polemics denying the extent of Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia are apparently not to be mentioned in polite company. Hollander dredges all this up, with useful annotation on just why these illusions persist. My one main criticism of this seminal book is its loose definition of the term 'intellectual'. Figures such as H.G.Wells or Bernard Shaw are indeed exemplars of the higher stupidity whereby intelligent men may take leave of all critical faculties when it comes to Left-wing tyranny. It is stretching that definition somewhat when Hollander refers also to intellectual lightweights like Jane Fonda.

These true accounts really show what God's work is all about and lets the rest of America feel how cozy it really is here inside these borders. Best missionary life story out there with the "just telling it how it was" style, and it doesn't allow the reader to be led into boredom for one line. Definitely worth reading, and the pictures are cool.

When you read this book it is as if you have experienced this advanture right along with them. One could almost taste the food, feel the heat of the sun and hear the thunder in the storms. Not only could one picture the beauty of God's handiwork but felt His presence guiding and protecting this man and his family.

The "Port of Two Brothers", is a wonderful bedtime story for those little ones, good research book for students, and totally entertaining for the older generation.

This is a wonderful and unique story!!!

Mr. Schlener takes his readers along with him on the remarkable journey of his family's experiences in the Amazon jungle. Mr. Schlener has a personable, easy writing style that captures his readers attention on the first page and keeps it throughout the book. It is an inspirational book. Thank you Mr. Schlener for writing it.