A wonderful compilation of Pan Am history. A godsend for Pan Am fans like me.

Glad that Pan Am is coming back as a deserving legend in aviation as well as a legend in world history. As a daughter of a 38 year veteran Pan Am pilot, I melted when I saw this book on the shelf of a book store the other day. I immediately bought it just for the face value but then when I took it home and read though the book, I found a beautifully and respectfully assembled book of Pan Am history. This book gives Pan Am the due admiration of the "World's Most Experienced Airline"...Forever....

Growing up in the Pan Am family, I have nothing but fond memories of this great era. This book has helped me relive those memories. 30 years later, this airline would be the reason I would become a professional pilot myself. Those were the days when flying was more of a luxury then a convience. Men dressed in suits and women in their best. It was an age of glamour that again can be enjoyed through this book. Thank you

This book will not just become another piece of bookshelf design. The reproductions are very good (much better in this hardcover version than in the soft cover...particularly in terms of color accuracy)As mentioned before, the writing is very engaging, well integrated with the images, totally relevant and easily referenced to actual plates. Strength of visual presentation is never compromised for economy of publication. Facts are developed in somewhat of a story form rather than that of a dry academic or bored docent offering. I especially enjoyed commentary on the influence and interplay Register experienced with writers John Fante, Charles Bukowski and Black Sparrow publisher John Martin.

Barnaby Conrad is a truly gifted writer and intellectual. His new book on the artist John Register is a wonderful tribute to an important american contempory artist.

Barnaby Conrad III is a high quality, well-educated author that is sensitive and brilliant in his ability to articulte and capture the essence of John Register in his suberb new book. This book is an important chronicle of a man who will become one of the important and accomplished artists of the twentieth century.

Bring together an elegant top-quality publishing company, a gifted photographer, superb essayists and you have all the makings for a good book. Let the subject be San Francisco, though, and you have a great book.

This is the 3rd edition of this best seller with 218 full color images by Morton Beebe as well as essays by Herb Caen, Tom Cole, Barnaby Conrad, Herbert Gold, John Hart, Allen Pastron, Miguel Pendás, and Kevin Starr. Together, they provide an intimate portrayal of the City by the Bay. This stunning collection of photographs captures the contrasts, the energy, and the vitality of San Francisco. As do the essays.

Tom Cole takes us back to the beginning and provides an historical review of the raucous town that suddenly grew up overnight in its feverish bid for gold. Barnaby Conrad leads us into the night with anecdotes witty, clever, and sensuous from an eclectic mix including, to name just a few, Graham Green, Frank Sinatra, and Eva Gabor.

"Bahnaby tells me you haf a vooden leg, vitch vun iz it?"
"Eva, I never thought I'd have to tell a Gabor what a man's leg feels like."
"Vell, dahling, ve vass never in zee lumber business!"

In a final essay, Allen Pastron walks us through much of the city beneath our feet. Here, we discover the world's finest anchorage being dug up and, therein, its archaeological heritage. Penned a "worm's-eye-view," the essay provides some wonderful insights into what was once the bawdy Barbary Coast - particularly, the story of the discovery of the buried ship General Harrison.

Rudyard Kipling opined San Francisco was "a mad city inhabited by perfectly insane people." So it lives on! Multi-faceted lifestyles unfold with each page, the images capturing the curious joie de vivre that reigns over The City. Other pictures highlight the unmistakable landmarks: the skyline with its Pyramid Building, the Golden Gate, and my favorite, the Palace of Fine Arts in the gentle light of dusk below a full moon glowing. The photos speak volumes in this book. Each offers a glimpse as to why the city Herbert Gold called "America's last great metropolitan village" has won the most coveted travel destination award in the world - now ten years in a row - the Condé Nast Traveler's annual Readers' Choice Awards.

San Francisco, City by the Bay, was first published in 1985. This edition features ninety new images and three new essays. The publisher, Abrams, boasts that Beebe's book is their longest running best seller. Not surprisingly. It is said that San Francisco is a city full of people that want to be here. Morton Beebe, a 3rd generation San Franciscan, reminds us of why this is so.

Beebe's images have truly captured the many diverse flavors and charms that make San Francisco the unique city that it is. Combined with the entertaining and informative essays, the beatifully printed images in this book bring a reader as close as one can come to walking through the streets of San Francisco itself. I throughly enjoyed this book.

Absolutely gorgeous pictures, great for San Francisco lovers. New edition has several new pictures and essays. It serves as a great gift if you are visiting someone and want to show off the city you live in

The beautiful reproductions of Mark Stock's paintings enticed me to keep reading this interesting book about a gifted man and his work. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in art and the artist of the 21st century. Mark Stock is the modern Renaissance man.

Mark Stock has designed several critically acclaimed sets for the Los Angeles Chamber Ballet and other Los Angeles-based dance troupes. He has authored the screenplay for the 1993 film Fleshtone (based loosely on his life and painting motifs). He spends most of his evenings drumming for a professional jazz trio at the Cypress Club in San Francisco. With the publication of Mark Stock: Paintings, he will now be recognized as a superbly talented and imaginative painter whose artwork is as memorable as it is engaging. The majority of the 112 oil paintings featured focus on the tribulations of romantic passion and ranging from sympathetic to ironic. Barnaby Conrad's lucid text, sprinkled throughout with black and white photography, uniquely showcases and introduces Mark's artwork. An informative essay by Mark Huge Miller deftly examines the connection between much of Mark's work and the seductions and betrayals that were so characteristic of the film noire genre. Mark Stock: Paintings is a highly recommended addition to any personal or public library 20th century artbook collection.

The ideal gift for the man who appreciates both beautiful books and beautiful blondes. Indeed, men and women alike will appreciate this exceptional effort from the charming Mr. Conrad, who has somehow managed to imbue his book with a magical feeling of blondness. Strongly recommended, despite a few errors. For example, Sam Brody was a passenger, not the driver, in the car accident that killed Jayne Mansfield. Also, BC III could have done without including people like Princess Diana, Drew Barrymore and, especially, Madonna. But you can't go wrong with a book that has Veronica Lake on the front cover and Kim Novak's back on the back.

If you don't already have a good reason to want to write a book - and let's face it most book lovers at one time or another fancy themselves as budding authors - this book will help you find one!

It is concise and well-thought out. An enjoyable as well as instructional read.

If you are an intending author, Amazon's powerful search functions will lead you to other similar and complementary books to help build your skills as a writer and improve your knowledge of the publishing industry.

These aspects are both "must knows" if you are truly serious of reaching your goal as a published author.

I read this book several years ago. It's the only book that has brought a bit of tear to my eyes. Was at the end when they ---well, you read it

This book will bring back memories of the fun, exciting, wonderful days and nights of the 60s in San Francisco. Names,places and incidents I had forgotten about were brought back to life by Barnaby Conrad. I found myself laughing out loud at the anecdotes shared. A great gift for anyone who lived in SF at the time. Nostalgia at its best!

Purchasing a first class photographer's books, when well printed, is a unique opportunity to own fine art at bargain prices and makes an outstanding gift. Morton Beebe's San Francisco is an opportunity to acquire world class photography and an outstanding visual essay on one of the finest cities of the world at an incredibly reasonable price. The exceptional essays by Herb Caen, Tom Cole, Barnaby Conrad, Herbert Gold, John Hart and Kevin Starr which accompany these photographs are an added bonus. The first class Japanese printing contracted by Harry Abrams illustrates some of Mr. Beebe's fine pieces with an exceptionally high quality. Among the photographs which are highlights of the book include a beautiful series of 13 double page spread photographs followed by a four page aerial photo fold out view, wonderful views of San Francisco's musical culture including a unique view of the Opera House on an opening night and wonderful portraits of the Stern Grove concerts, an exceptional portrait of the Bank of America Building reflecting light from its multifaceted surfaces in the fog and some of the most outstanding documentation of the rare lighting storms that visit the Bay Area. If you have a friend or member of your family who's interested in San Francisco, Mr. Beebe's book is an excellent candidate gift.

This book is great--it has history, humor, and lots of glamorous pictures, and manages to keep the cheese factor very low. A great gift for the drinkers in your life!

A delightful coffee table book, with great pictures and heady writing, about the history of the martini in American culture. Thankfully, it pretty much disavows, by giving it scant mention, the campy, faddist and superficial appropriation of Martini Culture by the Lounge Movement -- or whatever else you'd like to call it. (What I'm talking is that annoying phenomenon, prevalent during the nineties, but still with us, of yuppies and Gen-Xers listening to the likes of Tony Bennett and Sinatra, with a thick prophylactic of postmodern irony, while drinking blue martinis).

Or, as Barnaby Conrad sez in his book (himself the son of a well-known San Francisco restaurateur) : "The Martini's resurgence is more than just marketing expertise aimed at a generation of yuppies weary of wine or cocaine. It represents a return to style and tradition."

And, if you like this one, be sure to check out Conrad's book on the "green fairy." Also, for a more in-depth sociological treatment of the martini, check out Lowell Edmunds' THE SILVER BULLET.

Now HERE is a hip coffee-table book. It's true that it isn't as colorful (or fundamentally healthy in subject) as Drew Kampion's "Stoked: A History of Surf Culture" (ISBN 1575440628). Nor as vividly gothic as David King's "The Commissar Vanishes," containing photographs re-touched during the Stalin regime so that unpersons might become unremembered, while the old women with the thick glasses and awkward sheaves of the forbidden-book registry (updated monthly) made the rounds of the bookshops and libraries to preen the inventory (ISBN 0805052941). Nor again is it as deeply, internationally hip as Conrad's earlier "Absinthe: History in a Bottle" (1988, reprinted 1997, ISBN 0811816508). As a European-émigré acquaintance recalled, for example: "It was 1950, we had just been married, we were driving through this little town in Switzerland. It was a Sunday after church, and the place seemed deserted. But there was a large inn, where we stopped. Most of the town was there, having a glass of wine. There was also a little private room, and the local leaders were there, the mayor, the bishop, the chief of police, and the innkeeper, who had come out to see who we were. While the rest of the people were having a glass of wine, they were off to themselves, having an absinthe, a little furtively. All perfectly illegal, and totally charming. I made a witty remark about this, a little off-color. The bishop laughed heartily, and they welcomed us in and gave us each an absinthe and toasted our marriage." (See also my separate recommendation posted for the Conrad "Absinthe.")

These are all interesting coffee-table books, and they all deal with some kind of history. But none of the others starts with lines like "I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini." Conrad's Martini book is the most US-pop-culture-hip of this bunch. It is light-hearted and loaded with trivia, from old magazine advertisements to collectible cocktail shakers to an unforgettable movie photo on page 53 of Joan Crawford in high-contrast black-and-white, Martini in one hand, cigarette in the other. It is an instructive history as well as a very funny narrative.

By the late 1970s the Martini was dying out, as Conrad mentions; it was unhip, old-fashioned. By 1990 (Conrad doesn't mention but I do) a character in Eric Kraft's contemporary novel "Reservations Recommended" (ISBN 0517572338) was so out-of-it that he "ordered a martini without irony." You wouldn't have guessed it by the late 1990s when a suburban Crate-and-Barrel store was selling seemingly little else but Martini glasses and 1930s-reproduction cocktail shakers, and the Libbey Glass website offered numerous Martini models including with Z-stems. The Martini did not stay unhip for long.