For anyone who loves the West -- Old or New -- this innovative atlas must find a place on your bookshelf. Created at the University of Colorado's Center of the American West, it charts beautifully and eloquently how the American West has evolved. This volume will help you understand how some myths of the West grew out of proportion to the facts, and how some are not myths at all, but semi-fantastic truths.

To understand the contemporary West, this book would be a good starting place.

One of the best introductions to social, economic and environmental trends taking place in the Western United States. The graphs and photos highlight the new trends from water usage to ethic population patterns. The 7 chapters and two essays provide telling examples of how communtities are adapting to the changes (or not adapting in some cases). The work is footnoted to provide jumping off points for more research. Also, I found the quotes that are placed throughout the margins of the text to be extremely insightful.

The book shines at showing how the West is moving away from a culture of exploiting natural resources for basic industry and instead exploiting the natural beauty to draw ever increasing numbers of residents and visitors.

The University of Colorado's School of Geography uses basic demographic and economic data to profile in understandable maps and graphs the population explosion occurring in the Western United States. The Atlas gives a dramatic presentation of the net in migration into an area with little water and vast amounts of open space. It chronicles the shift in economic activity from traditional industries such as mining and logging, to new industries such as information technologies and service activities. The latter having a special, and economically, rewarding basis in tourism. The Atlas portrays, in graphic form the perdictions made in Cadillac Deseret. It is a must read for anyone concerned about perserving western heritage for future generations.

I bought this book hoping it would provides ways to improve my retouching skills/techniques. That turned out not to be the case.

The sample images are largely poor starting points, but the work done takes many more steps than other, widely known, techniques, AND result in images that are worse than the originals: the retouching is obvious and intrusive, and the reason for that is the technique as much as the execution of it.

If you're a Photoshop novice, the missing steps will confuse you. If you're an advanced user, you'll realize that the recommended approaches are harder than they need to be, and give results worse than easier methods.

Some interesting concepts from the authors, but it's not a Photoshop book I could recommend to anyone.

This book has some really good ideas. The writing is somewhat conversational, not cookbook-style, so it's true that beginners could be easily lost. If you've taken the time to learn Photoshop you won't have a problem. If you've tryed to shirk your way through it, and think this book will help you continue on that path with a bunch of step-by-step how-to instructions, you'll be disappointed.

As you may be able to tell by a couple of the unfortunate reviews of this book, you will not want to purchase ' Photoshop Face to Face' if you are new to Photoshop. It is a book for the experienced user, kind of a treat to those who have spent hours of training in a program no one would call simple to use.

So, if you consider yourself an intermediate or above user and would like to learn some skills which will benefit anyone's resume (while having a blast doing it), buy this book. On the other hand, if you are a new user to Photoshop and get frustrated without very specific open-this, close-that type of instructions, you may want to pass on this one and choose one of the hundreds of books dedicated to beginners (after all, we all had to start somewhere).

Just my two and a half cents,
Leslie

For reasons of political and religious correctness the Americans have issued their own versions of these pocket books. The British ones are much better.

Beautiful little series of books which I was coveting (mea culpa) long before I bought them. It seems awfully unfair for the people below to give the book such a low rating becase 'nick cave' didn't introduce the chapter. Who cares?

I enjoyed the format, design and lush language of the book.

I gather from the other extremely negative reviews that the British edition of this book has an introduction written by Nick Cave. While I'm sure Nick Cave's commentary on Mark is wonderful, so is the introduction by Barry Hannah in the American edition. Barry Hannah, a hilarious and rough-cut Southern novelist whose ability to craft a startling sentence is nearly unsurpassed, is drawn to Mark for reasons likely similar to those that drew Cave (or to those that led Borges to write an astounding story called "The Gospel According to St. Mark"): Mark is the strangest, least comforting of the Gospels, forging a dim and demanding Christianity out of the disquieting words and acts of Jesus with a minimum of explanation. God seems distant and truly ungraspable here; Mark is a million miles from the cloying certitude of the Pauline epistles, or from, say, the more prosaic Matthew. Hannah, a self-described "bad Christian" (again, not so different from Nick Cave, at least by my lights), manages to bring these qualities out beautifully in his introduction. (Hannah also makes "bad Christian" seem like probably the best thing anyone can hope to be.) By all means, get the British edition with Cave's introduction (as I now plan to do), but don't let that keep you from reading Barry Hannah's introduction too.