Thank you Nigel Foster for such a complete and wonderful guide! I have been to a few areas in Florida, and can not wait to go this February and "try" out a few more of the recommended trips. A friend and I are going to go to Ding Darling Refuge and the Black Island (Lover's Key) trip at the very least. The trip descriptions have me longing for my vacation to get here. Very good maps, and I appreciate the section on places to stay and camp!

Very good advice in the Keys section. Did several of the trips recently. Always "as advertised" in the book.
Worth the $$$.

Nigel Foster has finally turned his excellent writing skills to South Florida. Having kayaked in South Florida for the past 6 years, I have personally done most of the trips described in the book. Mr. Foster's descriptions are brief, but his attention to detail, and excellent on-water guides make the book very useful. Short accounts of the history of some areas (i.e., "The Watson Mystery") enliven the book. It is written in the style of a travel guide - a bit unusual for a guide to kayak touring, but it lends itself to the area. His "Caution" tips, e.g., "Watch out for racoons at your picnic site." are well-chosen. Trip ratings are very reasoned and appropriate, e.g., "Paddling the outer coast is committing, with exposure to the Gulf...Waves across Whitewater Bay generally produce a short chop...No one lives in this area, and there's no way out of it except at the camping sites...." A concisely written book. Well done!

Being an experienced sea kayaker I often review books to evaluate the competence of the authors. This book is written by kayakers who really love the sport and want to share it but who have chosen not to guide new kayakers' every stroke. So many guide books do the entire trip for you leaving you with little to learn about your personal skill and no adventure whatsoever. They give you the basics and then leave it to you to discover yourself and adventure. Great guidebook!

Good directions to put-ins and landmarks visible on the water

We referred to this book time and time again and found accurate, precise information regarding Lake Michigan and Superior paddle trips. Guided us to many accesible sites that represents the true nature of both lakes, from sandy beaches to rocky shores. An accurate guidance of what skill level should attempt each trip. Great book to use as a guide to map a vacation. Also good information regarding restuarants and camping spots.

This book was beautifully illistrated, and informational. Each photographed bridge holds part of our past, and an oppertunity to understand a part of our history. Once inside the pages you are transported back into a time that others have forgotten. I recommand this book to all who have been in love with the Covered Bridge for a long time, and to thoes like me who have just fallen in love with this beautiful part of our history.

What a wonderful book. It's a series of great photos of significant covered bridges, with descriptions that include building methods and styles, dates, history and best yet... driving directions! I find myself itching to go out and visit some nearby ones. An enjoyable, easy read that I know I will refer to over and over.

Brian's book is filled with some of the most breathtaking photographs you will ever see of Covered Bridges. If a bridge had a soul, he certainly knows how to capture it with his photographs. The historical and technical information is wonderful as well. It is a magnificent book!

This book is perfectly calculated to be read in the street on a hot day, holding the place lightly with a finger as one walks from one superb building to the next. Effortless learning and prose shine on them like a torch. The book has the humility to accept historical Islam on its own terms, uniquely explaining the Arabic texts written on walls already saturated with religious and political meaning. Is there any other guide quite like it and quite as good?

Cairo is one of the great cities in the world, and a walk through its Islamic areas transports you back hundreds, even thousands of years. This guide has been my bible as I've walked and walked and walked on many visits over the years. It illuminates what you see. Almost every block has something of interest, and it is invariably described lucidly in this guidebook.

Enough said -- if you want to walk through Islamic Cairo, you need this book. And if you don't want to walk, the book will make you want to!

Caroline Williams and her predecessors have put together a marvelous guide to most of the Islamic monuments, large and small, in Cairo. The book is divided by sections of the city and Williams suggests several "tours" visitors can give themeselves. I found it a valuable "tour guide" when I was exploring the city and an important reference when cataloging my slides after returning home. With detailed information about the history and finer architectural points of some two hundred monuments, as well as tips for getting around Cairo, this book (or its paperback version, ISBN 977-424-316-2) is a must-have for every Cairo-bound traveller!

The cops and robbers game was played differently in St. Paul in the '20's and '30's than in most American cities. That's because in St. Paul organized crime was largely controlled by the Police Department. Consequently, it became the headquarters for fugitive gangs who found refuge there until Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and the Barker-Karpis gang brought federal heat to the Twin Cities in 1934. The story of the "public enemies" who found sanctuary through local mobsters and police contacts in St. Paul is told in full glorious detail here for the first time, thanks to author Paul Maccabee's great research and his battle for the release of long buried FBI files. It's a must read for all gangster buffs.

What the lengthy reviews don't really touch upon is the writing style of the author. Maccabee is has a great touch -- light, breezy and able to turn deadly serious without a wisp of melodrama. The book is organized in short snippets, little windows into the world of the times. It is tempting to grab the book and just read one of the snippets. Good luck. I've been late to work, appointments, dinner, etc, too many times because I've gotten sucked in to "just reading one more". Certainly, it's tantalizing to know the places Maccabee describes firsthand as a St. Paul resident (imagine my surprise when I found that my office was once home to a huge underworld betting parlor!) I would guess that Maccabee's storytelling insticts would enthrall people from any geographic location.

The editorial reviews above pretty much say it all--I'll just add that this book was my expert guide around St. Paul on a snowy Sunday in December. It's a class act--well-written and slickly designed on glossy paper, with plenty of rare photos. If you're interested in Depression-era crime, all you have to do is buy this book from Amazon and a plane ticket to the Twin Cities.

I have been in business for myself for three years. I have read many books on running businesses. If I had to choose just one, it would be Leep of Strength. Walt Sutton brings a real world perspective and down to earth practical advise to the reader. Many business books seem to try to make is sound so easy. He makes it clear it is one of the most difficult things a human being can attempt. I wish every government offical would read it before they vote to regulate businesses even more. The most valuable advice that stuck with me was his pitch to stay debt free, or as debt free as possible in running a business. If you are a business owner or contemplating starting one, do not start without first reading this book, and then every six months thereafter.

Mr. Sutton's book rang so true for me. The three parts: experience, critical tasks, and valuable tools all gave tremendous insights into starting and maintaining a successful business from the CEOs personal perspective. This is one of the few books that I have ever seen that told the "secrets" of the thinking of successful entrepreneurs. I used all the tools such as conducting yearly strategic planing, assessing the core team, having a disaster plan, and many others. I know I will read it more than once.

Walt Sutton captures the essence of the entrepreneur CEO.If you are one, you will enjoy finding yourself in these pages.If you want to be one, read this book and then read it again and again....

Use literature and literary figures to follow in the footsteps of notable writers and their settings with the aid of a title which covers many destinations, from the Prague of Kafka to Steinbeck's California setting for Cannery Row. Add first-person reflections on the literature containing the settings and you have an excellent take-along or travel planner.

Literary Trips: Following In The Footsteps Of Fame is a superbly presented compendium of observations, adventures, and travels of and by some of the best loved writers as they trekked around the world. A magnificent armchair travelogue, Literary Trips is divided as the world is: Africa to Australasia (Paul Bowles, T. E. Lawrence, Rohinton Mistry, Bruce Chatwin); North America: West (Malcolm Lowry, The Beats, D. H. Lawrence, Garrison Keillor and Sinclair Lewis); North America: East (Tennessee Williams, Margaret Mitchell and Tom Wolfe, Ayn Rand, Mark Twain, Elizabeth Smart); Caribbean and Latin America (Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming and Noel Coward, John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood); Great Britain and Ireland (W. B. Yeats, Jane Urquhart and the Bronte Sisters, A. A. Milne, Agatha Christie and Jane Austen); Continental Europe (Knut Hamsun, The Lost Generation, Mary Shelley). Highly recommended for both school and community library collections, Literary Trips is enhanced for the reader with a section on biographies and a "user friendly" index. A novel and original feature of this publication is that any of the chapters are available as separate, individual e-texts and downloadable from the GreatestEscapes.com website.

This is a book to savor in a cigar lounge...in the corner of a jazz club...in front of a softly crackling fire at home. Or in a hammock under a royal palm in the deep, deep south.

I started out by nestling with the book into our oversized, down-filled sofa - and ended up traveling through one of the best reads of my life. Several times, I startled my husband with cries of "No kidding...Wow...I didn't know that...Ohmigod..." as I discovered new places in the hearts of my favorite authors. And delved into the lives of others I knew little about.

Literary Trips probes into the past, yet is formatted for the present. We're all used to reading in chunks now - short, self-contained sections that are complete, independent modules. And this book is totally "today" in that respect. Each chapter, written by a different person, is a complete story - gift-wrapped with its own special signature. Each has its own flavor, its own style, its own finds. Every writer has unearthed amusing tidbits and lively tales that add richness and depth to well researched and beautifully written prose.

The book is also an excellent travel guide for following in those famous footsteps. Each module contains a practical reference section listing hotels and other stomping grounds of famous feet ("Literary Sites"; "Literary Sleeps"). Each section also describes how to get to those grounds and provides useful tips and background information.

My favorite parts are the little surprises throughout. For example, did you know that: §Hemingway dedicated his Nobel Prize for literature to the patron saint of the basilica in Santiago de Cuba? § Ian Fleming wrote the James Bond novels at Goldeneye, his home in Jamaica, and named 007 after the local author of a book on birds? §When Ayn Rand was writing Atlas Shrugged, which took 12 years, she didn't leave her apartment for an entire month?

Another of the book's delightful dimensions is a smattering of recipes that could form a menu for a literary memorial party. You could honor D.H. Lawrence with his dandelion wine; Hemingway with double daiquiris; Mistry with Dhansak; and Sinclair Lewis with his "Sinful Christmas Cookies".

I'm always looking for inspiration for my own writing, and Lit Trips provides it on many fronts. Much of it comes from seeing so many authors "under one cover" - an excellent way to compare styles, to link lives, to see how they made their magic. But I was no less inspired by the talent of the book's contributing writers.

Rachel Kaplan's delightful guide provides timely support for museums off the beaten track in the wake of the recent move to make many of London's larger and more famous entrance-charging museums, including the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, free of charge. The books provides a wealth of information about the content and appeal of the museums, yet also fuels the readers' desire to see for themselves. The one problem, almost inevitably with this type of volume, lies with the subjectivity of the selection. Some museums, such as the Museum of London, are arguably too well known to merit inclusion, whilst others, including the fascinating Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, are inexplicably absent. Nevertheless, an admirably wide range of museum types is presented, catering to a diverse range of readers. It is useful for numerous demographics, from those looking for a child-orientated outing that involves more than looking at dinosaurs to those who might want an unusual alternative to tours of stately homes.

Despite the Horniman Museum quibble, inclusion of quirky South London venues including the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Cuming Museum, the Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum and the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum provides a laudable exception to the prevalent North and West London bias exhibited in virtually all London guides to tourist attractions and events. Whilst the three latter entries are marginal collections that deserve the praise and exposure they receive here, the Dulwich Picture Gallery is a highly significant art collection. This book forms a useful supplement to familiar general publications, such the Rough Guides, which do not have the space to enter into such textual and pictorial detail on individual collections. Kaplan's elegant and deceptively simple prose distils an extraordinary amount of scholarship into a compulsively readable form. It is an uncommon pleasure to read a guidebook marked by such a rigorous intellectual element as well as clear evidence of comprehensive first-hand knowledge and enthusiasm.

Beautifully illustrated and written, Kaplan reveals the real London -- the London most first-time visitors don't get a chance to see using traditional guide books. I highly recommend it for a more intellectual and quirky view of this eccentric culture and people. This takes you to a world way beyond the norm you never would have seen otherwise. I use her guides for all the cities she chooses to write about --

As an American who lived in London for 15 months, I thought I knew every museum in and around the city. But Ms. Kaplan's beautifully written guide introduced me to several unkown gems. What makes this guidebook so appealing, and unusual, is that in addition to decribing the museum's contents she tells you the story of how the museum came to be. Ms. Kaplan's fascinating anecdotes put the museums and their collections in the appropriate historical and political context making for a more meaningful visit. I also highly recommend her books about Paris and Berlin.

I have only had this book for a few months but every recipe I have tried from it is wonderful. I really like some of the desserts. The pictures are great and all of the recipes are really easy to follow. I am very picky about cookbooks, and I really like this one.

These two authors write stunning books of delightful, easy-to-follow recipes, with lush, evocative photographs, and great attention to detail on the culinary fundamentals of each recipe. The only problem is that they keep recycling and republishing the same recipes/photos over and over again. I got burned three times. I bought the book "A Taste Of The Mediterranean", which I liked so much that, impetuously, I went online and bought three more titles by the same two authors, Jacqueline Clark and Joanna Farrow. I got "The Mediterranean Cookbook" (the one with the close-up photo of some ripe tomatoes on the cover). It turns out that this is the exact book as "A Taste Of The Mediterranean", but with illustrations in place of the photographs. The third book I received was "Mediterranean Country Kitchen", which while it is a lovely book, is nothing more than a condensed version of the same recipes/photos from "A Taste Of The Mediterranean". Lastly I bought the newer hardback book "Mediterranean : A Taste Of The Sun". This is an outstanding, lengthy book (500+ pages), but about half of it is "A Taste Of The Mediterranean" recycled in its entirety. I would certainly recommend the new one "Mediterranean : A Taste Of The Sun" as the finest and most complete of Clark and Farrow's sumptuous books on subject. But I'm feeling angry and a bit duped at buying the same book over and over again. Buy the new one, skip the earlier, cleverly-disguised retreads.

I received this book as a Christmas present from my boyfriend and I love it. Within the first couple of weeks of owning the book, we have already made five recipies from it - unlike as with some books I have purchased which looked great but proved daunting. Every recipe we have tried has been simple and elegant. Even better, they and made with ingredients that are not expensive or hard to find. For example, we made the Spanish Garlic Soup with a Parmesean Risotto for a group of 6 people: it took us about one hour total and only cost $10. Plus, each recipe is accompanied by at least one picture.

Now in a newly updated eighth edition, travel expert Deborah Sakach's The Official Guide To American Historic Inns: Bed & Breakfasts And Country Inns continues to be is a grand and enthusiastically recommended reference for tourists and travelers throughout America seeking to experience the unique and memory-making Bed & Breakfast and historic Country Inns. Covering 2,400 lodging coast to coast, and in every state of the union, The Official Guide To American Historic Inns lists each inn and B&B with its address, phone number, fax if available, email if available, brief historic description, price, credit cards accepted, luxuries available (such as cable or a swimming pool), and more. If you are planning a trip around your state or anywhere in the country, begin your planning by browsing through this superb catalogue which is certain to feature an historic inn to please you and make your stay truly memorable.

My new hobby is scanning this book from cover to cover highlighting all of the wonderful inns I'm going to visit. This is a delightful book of very reasonably priced inns in the US and Canada. Every entry provides unusual information about the inns, mouth-watering breakfasts offered and local attractions. This book is well worth the money and is easily one of the best (if not the best) travel books I've ever purchased. I've highlighted over 20 inns to visit and I'm not even halfway through the book.

This updated seventh edition offers an easy-to-use format detailing more than two thousand historic lodgings in all fifty states, Puerto Rico, and Canada. State maps locate each inn and B&B, as well as a special "Inns of Interest" index helping travellers to select an itinerary that suits their particular interests. A highly recommended travel planning aid.