The President of our Mother's Club recommended this book and it is wonderful! The author, Sharon Krull, speaks at Mother's Clubs throughout Northern California and is an incredibly dynamic speaker.

Though this book was published in 1990, and is itself a reprint of two Pentagon studies, it is still timely, perhaps unfortunately. The Pentagon has commissioned several studies in the past 50 years attempting to buttress their anti-gay policies. Yet each time these studies came to conclusions opposite those favored by the upper echelons, and so were suppressed. Ex congresspersons Gerry Studds and Patricia Schroeder were able to get two of these studies from the Eighties released despite stonewalling from the pentagon. They're reprinted here in their entirety.

The first and longest, is titled "Nonconforming Sexual Orientations and Military Suitability", the second is titled, "Pre service adjustment of Homosexual and Heterosexual Military Accessions: Implications Security Clearance Suitablity"

Both studies fail to support Colin Powells' superstitious beliefs about gays.

This is an excellent addition to the library of anyone interested in this topic. Great ammunition for arguments, because there are likely no Pentagon scientific studies coming to the opposite conclusion, as those would not have been suppressed as these were.

I bought this book for my trip to Kenya Uganda and Tanzania. I thought that I might want to travel to Ethiopia or down to Zambia and Zimbabwe....this guide is much too condensed to be helpful, and most travelers I met hated this guide and would borrow or end up buying the LP East Africa guide. You would be much better off buying a regional guide rather then this monster. Just the weight of the book alone isn't worth carrying around with you. I actually ended up ripping this book to shreads and keeping only about ten pages of it then buying the more in depth East Africa Guide.

Don't get me wrong, I love the lonely planet guides. Just not this one. I can whole heartedly recomment the East Africa guide and the Trekking East Africa guide.

This book, "Africa on a Shoestring, 9th Ed" has a broad coverage; although its chapters are not as detailed as many tourists would expect them to be.
Again, this book would have been of better psychic value, had its authors showed confidence in the sections they dealt with. Its 'information' became a wet blanket for me. Many readers who intend to visit African countries are likey to be discouraged by its relentless pessimistic approach. Its outlook is more critical than 'touristical'. The general impression is this: "something good may not come out of Africa". That is shameful! The term "bush-taxi", which was used over and over again, in lieu of a more cordial 'local-taxi' sounds offensive.
I think that if written (or revised) without assumptive bias, this book would be of better quality and value to its users.

Africa is large, and it's hard or impossible to concentrate so much information and advice into one book. Yet, Lonely Planet - as always - managed to do this with great muster. Unless you have time and money to buy the many LP guides to single regions and countries of Africa, this is the book you want before you even plan of visiting the black continent !