This book has beautiful photography with clear, concise information and descriptions of California's very best wineries. These are the wineries that are not only known for the high quality of their wines but for their beautiful gardens, architecture, tours, tastings, and art exhibits. The format is easy to follow. It features the counties of Napa, Sonoma, and the undiscovered but notable wine country of Mendocino, showing each winery alphabetically. Additional sidebars give phone numbers, driving directions, web sites, hours of operation, and a quick-reference of each facility's wine varieties and specialties. The mix of wineries makes for a unique wine country holiday. Small family-owned cellars are listed as well as the familiar national brands. It's the best book of its kind that I've seen and the only such book found in hardcover. Travel guides don't get much better than this.

We recently visited the lovely Napa and Sonoma valleys in Northern
California to do some wine tasting. With limited time to spend at each winery, we turned to this new hardcover guide to plan an itinerary. The book's images of each winery by master photographer Robert Holmes are striking; the information and maps are extremely helpful and accurate. Each winery is profiled within a two page spread and includes a convenient sidebar of facts about their specialty wines, tasting fees, tour and special event information, driving directions, and nearby attractions, Armed with winery phone numbers and websites we were able to call ahead to arrange for private, behind-the-scene tours. The book reads like an insiders' guide to this spectacular region. It not only lists the big "must see" destination wineries like Robert Mondavi, Beringer and Chateau St. Jean Winery but also directs readers to numerous little-known and charming family operations-like Raymond Burr Vineyards and Benziger Family Winery-that are well worth a visit. The unifying theme here is that all of the wineries profiled in this book are both recognized for making some of the world's finest wines and for being exceptional visitor destinations. Whether you're planning a trip to Northern California's wine country, as we did, or you just have a love for colorful and unique travel guides, I highly recommend this book. Even after returning home, we continue to use it as a reference of our wonderful trip to the Golden State.

Often when I come across a book considered a guide for fiction writers, I feel first an excitement and then a letdown. So many of these books are impractical and strictly theoretical, never allowing you to move easily from idea to example. Olmstead's book is the exception. In it, he has considered nearly every way writers tell stories, provided excellent examples of their methods and explained the effect, and followed these with exercises for the reader/writer. A number of my short stories contain passages that began as products of these exercises. You can't beat that for practicality. If you write, and you want to expand your understanding of crafting your stories, buy this book. Read it as a companion to John Gardner's Art of Fiction.

Library Journal's review of this guide: "Combining encyclopedic coverage of destinations with loads of practical information and atlas-type maps, the series illuminates the wonders of nature but emphasizes the peculiarity of a place's people and their folklore."

Olmstead is a master of the language, technical and common. The book itself may be one of the most mythic stories ever told, yet Olmstead never tries to make the story or its residents "large." He is content to place his characters in your path and smile when you are bowled over by the love that resonates in their lives.

This man is a writer of beautiful phrases, sentences and scenes. As I read the book, I wanted to believe that babies talk to God as little Eddie does in A Trail... I wanted to believe that people are as aware of their thoughts as they are in this book. Mostly, I didn't want this book to end....until I got about 2/3 of the way through.

Let me explain. The words and phrases and sentences and scenes ARE beautiful. The characters have rich, complex lives, and it is thrilling that Olmstead has created and shared them with us. But after awhile you notice that they really know too much. They impart WISDOM easily with eloquence in a way that doesn't happen in our world. And yet their lives, seem random, very much like ours. It's a contradiction that makes the book unsettling.

Like our lives, theirs miss narrative structure, and after awhile, no matter how beautiful the language and insights are, you want to see some progression. You want some organization to the plot. It won't happen. Read anyway, those sentences and scenes are that good. Just don't expect an organized plot, and don't expect what is there to hold much logic.

This book takes the reader through the seasons with the town mortician and his family. He is torn by his own desire to always do right, and to be a decent human being. The characters in the book are magical - from the widower who resumes his pre-marital motorcycle lifestyle, to a man who shows his brother-love through a cremation, to an enormous woman specializing in bonsai trees. . .not to mention the suspense the auther infuses into the business of daily living and dying. It's wonderful to read a book that takes one on a journey, and this book succeeds.

Let's be bluntly honest: this novel is phony...the prose is affected and contrived...Olmstead once again capitalizes on his broad knowledge of literary fiction. He has a talent for manipulating anyone that reads his work...but if you read this as a writer, you will smell the stink pretty fast.

Anyone who's ever written about their youth would have to be impressed by the perceptiveness and imagery with which Robert Olmstead weaves this tale. It captures the New Hampshire summer landscape in a thousand hues and textures, and it perches on the brink of leaving home, of irrevocable change in a family, in a way that abrades the reader's remembered growing pains. Is it possible that so many things happened in one week, played themselves out so poignantly? Maybe not. Is the girl he describes too perfect to be true? May be, (but young love captures the beloved's perfection in amber, so her portrait is true.) Is the writing style so poetic it sometimes makes me gnash my teeth with envy, and sometimes makes me want to groan, enough already, it's not the Song of Solomon? Yeah. But, man, oh, man. You got to admire the craft.

While I can see how some of the other reviewers feel that this book's art is too much for them, at the heart of the matter this is still a beautiful book. There is a story here that is something everyone of us has experienced or can relate too, but this story is not cliche, its not sappy, it has a warmth to it all its own. Bob does a nice job of not only telling a good story, but making it sound damn cool too.

If moronic men and cruelty to animals is your cup of tea, than this book is for you. Many of the inhabitants of this small town are the type you hope not to have to cope with in real life. My advice - don't stop - keep on driving!

There are only a handful of contemporary American fiction writers on par with Olmstead. And there's no better place to start than with Olmstead's first book, "River Dogs," a collection of short stories. Like John Cheever and Raymond Carver, Olmstead's short stories draw you into the strange, familiar world of small-town America through his careful, precise language. The stories also treat the characters with respect and honesty. My favorite stories are "A Good Cow," "In This Life" and the title story. This is definitely a good book for any young writer struggling to master the craft of storytelling. I highly recommend it.

I grew up spending my summers in rural New Hampshire and never thought I would read a book that captured the lives of the permanent residents so vividly. Almost all of these stories are about working people of New Hampshire and western Massachusetts. These are people with deeply ingrained emotional reserve that has often been cariactured, but rarely (in my experience) been presented with sympathy. Annie Proulx's "Postcards" is the other work of fiction that I have read lately that does so.

Terrible things happen to many of the characters in Robert Olmstead's stories and they rarely react in any outward way. Rather their tendency is to simply veer off-track in their lives. People that had been going somewhere have something precious taken from them and it causes them to close themselves off from their emotions and begin to lead lives of steadily increasing futility and pointlessness. On rare occasions an Olmstead character will go off the deep-end in dramatic fashion, but usually they just drift into an emotional and/or moral purgatory.

Having said all this, I must admit that I laughed out loud at some of the funnier moments in these stories, which include a dead cow floating down river, dead dogs and drunk people that fall out of the back of open pick-ups and outrageous bets that make people a lot of money and many enemies.

Contrary to what other have written, I would say that their is a great deal of depth to these stories and that the laconic way in which they are told may cause the casual reader to miss this. The descriptions of the various marriages, friendships and filial relationships in this book are much truer to life than a lot of people would probably like to admit.

I didn't like the novel because it was slow.
The two main characters were Romeo (Raymond) and Juliet...right from the beginning I knew there'd be trouble.
It was not until at least 70 pages in did I understand the reason behind Raymond's trek. Also, every character the two of them met on their trip thought Raymond was funny...he was not funny. If I met Raymond on a trip, I would punch him...hard.

This was a wonderful book that was artfully crafted and spoke to me. You have to read it!