Although the 2 plates I have are not featured in the book, there are pages and pages of color pictures and information that are really informative. There is also a chapter or two on oyster "trivia". For the price, this book should be a hardback, but otherwise the content is relavent and beautifully laid out. I highly recommend it to anyone who is even thinking about starting a collection. I never dreamed there were so many exotic oyster plates from so many different places!

This book contains 150 pages of beautiful color photographs as well as an easy to use index section. It is an excellent source for identification of these very collectible plates, and even gives a rarity guide. Provides information on the manufacturers, as well. An invaluable guide to the oyster plate collector!!!!

Other than the obvious exculpation of the authors and their Northern Miner for having been taken in as much as anyone, the book should be required reading for those involved in exploration and financing. Northern Miner also contributed as much as anyone to spreading the hype on Bre-X stock, and many small investors who relied on the newspaper as an accurate and reliable source of information not otherwise available to them got badly hurt. So the authors themselves are not free of blame. The deep involvement of industry leaders - Barrick Gold, Placer Dome and FreeportMcMoran - in the self-servingly and intensely publicized bidding wars for control of Bre-X and the Busang property is inexcusable. Their respective CEO's and Boards should have known better. The damage of the Bre-X fraud and all those even peripherally involved in it to the mining industry, particularly to the independants in the exploration end of the business is incalculable. So the "jury remains out." If from only the standpoint of having an unfolding story in one place, the book is a very good and worthwhile read.

This book is a well-researched, coherent and logical account of a gold-mining scam that literally rocked the foundations of the mineral exploration industry in the mid to late 1990s, and caught up in its maw the spectrum of individuals who make their living from exploring for, bankrolling, analyzing, developing and producing gold. It is above all a tale of how previously honorable people succumbed to the twin temptations of outright greed or wishful thinking.

I have some technical qualifications to assess the value of the book. I was an ore reserve geologist at a large gold mine in northern Nevada from 1988 thru 1997 responsible, during the last 5 of those years, for posting and interpreting thousands of assays to rectified, controlled cross-sections in a large open pit (approx 3 mi x 1 mi by 1900' deep in ultimate design). My work required constructing hundreds of orthogonal N-S and E-W sections in a commercial mine-modeling software program, and these sections were checked against plan maps over a 1900' vertical interval represented by 95 invidual benches of 20' height.

In early 1997, when Bre-X started making its assays from Busang (the deposit location in Indonesia) available on its web site, I took a look at them and reached conclusions similar to those of Merks, a Dutch statistician quoted in the book. Namely, the assay runs were inconsistent with any conceivable pattern of gold mineralization I had ever seen in 2,000 drill holes in a very productive gold environment.

At our mine, which was large, well-endowed with widespread sediment-hosted disseminated gold and occasional 'nugget' effects in fractures, the striking thing about the gold occurrence was how much barren rock can exist in a well-mineralized system. I had looked at literally thousands of down-hole assays, and knew that a huge deposit is possible even in the midst of much waste. Therefore, the extensive runs of mineralization at Busang appeared spurious or exaggerated on its face, and the occurrence in the same location of both low-grade and high-grade streaks was completely contrary to the behavior of gold we had seen in both host shales soaked in gold-bearing solutions, and in the occasional fracture-controlled settings in the same locality.
I came in the next day to the office and said flatly that, although I didn't know what was at Busang, if anything, the assays being reported were garbage and not to be believed.

The scam - which was achieved by implementing rigorously systematic but surreptitious salting of samples at a field preparation site - fell apart in early 1997 when other players interested in acquiring the assets, including members of the ruling Indonesian family and major mining companies, began to demand confirmation of the reported results, and could not obtain any.

The only winners in the story were the thousands of stockholders and speculators who rode Bre-X stock up and sold out before its peak; the losers were all the serious long-term investors, and a huge number of people in the exploration & mining industry who saw their collectively hard-won reputation for probity flushed down the toilet.

History is full of contradictions and ironies. This book is one of them.

How else can you explain how the one book historians claim is the most historically authentic Calamity Jane narrative, appears to have been written by the one scholar who despises her the most?

After years of exhaustive scholarly research, what does Roberta Beed Sollid have to say about Calamity Jane? In the introduction, Ms. Sollid calls..."the much publiciz-ed Calamity Jane, a well-meaning but good-for-nothing frontierswoman."

And, Calamity Jane is not the only one insulted in this book. A number of individuals and whole categories of human beings are described in negative terms. Even tourists visting the historic town of Deadwood, South Dakota, are described as "gullible".

Now, I do not mind that Ms. Sollid attempts to debunk the Calamity Jane myth and bring the real life of Martha Jane Cannary into the light of history. She does give the world new primary source material from her interviews of Deadwood citizens, and overall, she collects a considerable amount of authentic material.

But, Ms. Sollid cannot seem to keep her negative feelings out of what should have been a scholarly work, and I believe that this predjudices the text in both content and conclusion. Calamity Jane deserves better.

In 1949 when this work was being researched, it was a major focus for historians of the American West to correct the exaggerated romantic legends that had grown up around many memorable frontier figures. In our skeptical day and age that focus is far less helpful. Roberta Sollid did an excellent job of debunking the many unsubstantiated stories that surround "Calamity Jane". Unfortunately, this work totally fails to help us understand the real person and how she came to survive as a frontier woman who frequently fulfilled roles usually reserved for men.

This was a source for my term paper in college. The author is somewhat confusing as she consistently identifies several lies about Calamity Jane before telling the facts. Some of the time I couldn't figure out if what she was currently discussing was fact or fiction. However, after sorting through her analysis I was able to put together an exceptional list of facts that lead to an A on the paper. I would recommend this as a reference tool because it is the one book on Jane that I have found to actually assist in disproving the fictions of her life.