I've read thousands and thousands of books of all types, and this is my favorite one of all-time. This converted me into being a Galen Rowell fan. The photos were great as usual, but what got me was his writing. He is an amazing author! I have learned so much from his writings, and I still learn everytime I re-read the book. He is funny and in addition to being intelligent. His passion comes across clearly in this book. I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes to read, and you'd probably become a photographer afterwards.

It cannot be helped ... I'm partial to Rowell ... have been, ever since I started serious photography in '89 ... His photographs have always left me in awe ...

So you can imagine my surprise, when I found myself reading the words with as much care as I was looking at the photos ... Rowell carefully describes his preparations, his thoughts and preferences ... he writes as he photographs ... in a direct manner, with few affectations and no gimmicks ... The reader learns not so much about f-stops or apertures, but is introduced into the mind set of an adventurer, an exceptional photographer ... whose approach to image making is both pragmatic and inspirational ... the photographs are more instructional than usual ... but an exceptionally good read!

If you wish to become an active, thoughtful photographer, one who is conscientious about seeing, especially from another point of view, and you are willing to take the time and effort to get a shot, this book is for you.

Galen Rowell's essays are richly entwined with clear strands of philosophical, technical, and artistic perspectives.

Like Galen has done most of his life--explore and adventure--the book is an exploration of inner and outer realms. Throughout the 60 essays, we explore the outer, physical world, as well as the inner thoughtful and emotional world that accompanies aesthetic photography.

Galen becomes our guide as he shows us new pathways of exploring photography. We learn to think about creating visual order out of chaos. We see the relationship between thoughtful preparation and capturing an image. While commonsense techniques are suggested, we learn to validate old technology as well as recent innovations. We are apprised of ethical issues when shooting. And most important (for me) we explore the resonance between spirit, content, and form through photography.

This book, with its exquisite images and stories behind them, will likely help you see better, become more contemplative as a photographer, and encourage you to capture that which you see with greater emotional integrity and technical competence.

This book is truly incredible!Sometimes,I can`t believe my eyes. The original purpose of this book is to make people care about the ecosystems and why we should not destroy them.But I don`t know if this is a suitable purpose for a book like this one. The splendid photographs makes you forget that and just look at the true beauty of our planet. Over 200 locations and 250 illustrations makes a perfect view of world wildlife. Among my favourites are the mexican deserts,the Pantanal Rainforest and all of the underwater photographs. I am a lover of all kinds of animals,especially fishes. So that`s why the book is perfect for me. I recognize Frans Lanting and David Doubilet since earlier,and I got books by them both. Galen Rowell is new to me,but he seems to be very good too. And when these three photographs together,the results easily become the most beautifull nature photography book ever made!It is pretty expensive,but believe me,it`s worth the money. I highly recommend this to every lover of nature photographs or strong colours. It is truly inspiring.

It would be difficult indeed to over-estimate the sheer beauty of the photographs printed on the pages of Living Planet. Of course the three photographers were off to a great start as the subject matter they are presenting is riveting. There are so many truly exotic (and still unspoiled) locales explored here. And so many diverse, truly impressive plant and animal forms documented.

But these three gifted photographers are superbly inspired practioners and so they are able to elevate the naturally exalted to an entirely new level of organisation. This is accomplished specifically, at least in part, by the use of super-saturated color in combination with consistently fresh and geometrically complex composition. The results, printed with great care by Crown Publishers, are extraordinary!

The photography is so visually stunning that it is easy to forget the purpose of this book which was published by the World Wildlide Fund. Thus the text, which is teeming with information, emphasises not the beauty of what has been captured on film. Rather it focuses on the steadily progressing ecological nightmare as humans-induced species extinction of animal and plant life proceeds around the globe in an unchecked and relentless manner. To quote briefly from the introduction by Walter Cronkite, "Earth is losing one-hundred species of animals, plants, insects and fungi every day. Experts estimate that the world has lost one-third of its biological wealth over the last thirty years." Astonishing facts the sobriety of which contrasts mightily with the visual celebration of life as depicted in this wonderfully elegant volume.

It was interesting to note that this book is among several top 10's in science. It must result from good educational institutions: I saw this book courtesy of my daughter and was able to spend time with it over the holidays. There is an urgent message here, as everyone knows and WWF is able to get important people on board, not only with endorsements but with their explanations of the threat the world's ecology is facing. This book does a good job of framing out the larger picture already set by books this year which have given compelling narratives also illustrating the biodiversity crisis-- Goodall's Reason for Hope, Johnson and Coates' Nabokov's Blues, and other books like Quammen's Song of the Dodo. Its good to see all these books getting attention. It is going to take a mammoth awareness to really move the world, most of whom will never see amazon.com and this review away from the global destruction that today is most often the norm.

If there is any photo book to buy purely for visual pleasure, this is it. The is simply the best deal. A ton of photos, of Galen Rowell quality, minimal but effective text and about North America. It is essentially his life's portfolio of our continent.

Galen Rowell is one of the very best when it comes to stunning landscape pictures in great moods. This book is full of them and I consider it a must for every fan of the great American landscape. Only sometimes you wish that the two-page-prints originally would have been made with medium or large format cameras. But then you cannot blame Rowell because only small format provides the flexibility that's imperative to capture the most special moods in nature. And no, I don't know Rowell personally, unfortunately.

The art of capturing nature and landscapes are at its best in this book by Galen Rowell. The breathtaking and awe-inspiring photographs would inspire any photographer to look at landscapes from a different point of view, and to appreciate the work of God in the best possible way. The beauty of nature is there for us to enjoy and what more to document this beauty with our cameras! It is indeed an excellent book depicting American beauty.

A very helpful guide for driving up or down my favorite coast in the world! Doerper takes you almost mile by mile - was particularly helpful as I drove from Sebastopol up to Menocino, heretofore undiscovered country for me. Galen Rowell's photographs have always been a treat. His death was a real loss, but at least you can tour the CA coast through his eyes in this book.

I liked this book enough to buy Doerper's corollary for the Pacific Northwest to use this year:)!

I bought this book before traveling from San Francisco down Big Sur (about halfway), and it has great coverage of the Big Sur coast, the Santa Cruz area, and San Francisco.

Costal California is more than just a guide book to the California coast. A first glance, Galen Rowell's spectacular photography, 25 full-color maps, wine labels, and historical photographs tell you that there can't be a better illustrated guide for this local. When you start to read this book, you find that it is more than just travel data. John Doerper writes, "The California coast is as much a state of mind as it is a place. Its people, and the stories and myths they have woven around this magic coast, are as captivating as the spectacular scenery." He obviously kept this thought in mind as he wrote this inspirational , entertaining, and expert guide.

The photographs in this book are simply breathtaking. The daily life of the everyday Tibetan come across vividly. The commentary by the Dalai Lama gives insight to the photos. I don't know if I would want to ever move to Tibet, but this book made me realize that it's a beautiful country.

I received this book today ... and I'm stunned ... don't hesitate, just order it ... put together by 2 individuals, each enlightened in his own unique way ... a king in exile, a monk, a man ... the other, an image maker, who sees with his soul, and lives for his craft ... about a land on top of the world, with history and culture as old and deep as the Himalayas are high ... the results are magical ... the photography and text flow from page to page ...

My husband bought this book to use the images of buddhist monks for a tattoo. He was going to leave it with the tattoo artist as a gift but decided to bring it home instead. I am so very glad he did!!!! I have become very interested in Tibetan Buddhism as well as the nature of the Tibetan land and people. Of all the information I have come across, this book is by far the most beautiful! The photography is stunning and the Dalai Lama's text is very moving. I highly recommend this to anyone who has an interest in Tibet or Buddhism. It is simply awe inspiring!

Galen Rowell was one of the great outdoor photographers and most of his books are full of spectacular pictures of mountain scenery. But if you are expecting a normal picture book about Alaska, this isn't it. Instead this is a look at a place that is full of ambiguity.

The book is structured around John McPhee's book "Coming into the Country". In that book McPhee gives an insightful description of Alaska as a place, and its inhabitants. The Alaskans seem torn between preserving the wilderness and developing it and the extracts contained in this volume capture that spirit. For example, McPhee provides admiring character studies of a number of people who came to Alaska because they just didn't fit in back in the lower 48 states. Even his descriptions of travels in the wilderness have an overlay of the politics of the state, where the federal government, which once owned most of the land, is distrusted by most citizens.

Rowell decided that he wanted to take McPhee's writing and illustrate it with his own pictures. The preface makes clear that McPhee didn't offer a lot of cooperation. In fact he warned Rowell not to overprint his verbal pictures with Rowell's. The text selection was made by Rowell and the pictures included are not directly related to the words but have a close connection to their spirit.

As I noted, this is not any ordinary Rowell book (if there is such a thing). There are far more pictures of human beings and their artifacts then one usually finds in such a book, and I sometimes felt that the pictures were gritty and dark. At first I thought that this was a shortcoming of the photographs but then I realized that Rowell had specifically selected these pictures because he believed that they reflected the spirit of McPhee's words. Oh, there are some grand landscapes like a picture of snow-covered Mount McKinley across isolated Nugget Pond, but there is also a picture of the same snow-covered peak taken across a dark, intruding asphalt highway into the wilderness.

The final pages capture the essence of this book. McPhee describes the role of the 55 gallon steel drum in the Alaskan landscape, and tells how his view has gone from considering them ugly to finding them almost blooming. Opposite these words Rowell has placed a picture of a long line of rusty drums curving sinuously out of the frame into the Arctic Ocean.

This book is more than 20 years old and the McPhee book almost 40 years old. Alaska may have changed since then, although everything I've read about it recently makes me believe that the same forces are still at work out on this frontier. But for a person interested in Alaska this book provides a feeling for the place and its people that has the ring of authenticity.

If you want to see Alaska as a work of art, then I would recommend Art Wolfe's recent book of photographs "Alaska". But if you want to understand how a bright place can still have a dark soul, "Images of the Country" is a good place to start.

"Alaska" is one of those books that, after teh first few pages lets you forget the world around you and fly to other places. His pictures are breathtaking, and it is true : a picture sas more than a thousand words; rowell manages it to tell you more about Alaska with a couple of photographs than 100 professors could tell you. He shows the reader that there is still some pure wilderness out there and that it is worth to preserve it. rowell is someone who loves the wilderness and the beauty of nature and he makes you love it too.

Turning to page 74, my Danish-born wife, Aino, was amazed to discover her little town of Scoresbysund. She spent her fomative years(age 5-12)growing up there, where her father, Dr. Werner Mortensen, served as the sole doctor for the area of 3 villages.

Galen Rowell's photography captures the typical beauty of a Scandinavian mileau, even though it is truly a facade for the garbage that the typical native Greenlander casts no further than his front door!

His words portray the many problems of the native Inuits, who have been unable to adapt to the influence of Danish culture and progress. For Rowell to elaborate on the problems of alcholism, violent crime, and the high rate of suicide in a village of only 500, distinguishes him as an author that researchs his subjects quite well! It brought back memories for my wife of the "Grundlander" that beat his wife with the carcass of a frozen seal, only to have his wife bite of his ear.

The large yellow building in the left foreground is the eight bed hospital; the little red house with white trimmed windows that is over to the immediate left is where family Mortensen grew up from 1966-72. This book really takes my wife back,and helps me see things that were only in her mind's eye. It also brings her up to the what the present day Scoresbysund has become. And now that my family will be moving to Fairbanks,Alaska, my wife can get a sneak preview of our future from this marvelous book. Having lived in Alaska myself, I definitely recommend this book for its shear splendid photography and candid commentary. Great job Galen!

This is much more than a coffee table book, though its unique photographs of the pristine beauty of the Arctic and Antarctic would impress even the most casual of browsers. A short story about each photo is included, along with more general, thoughtful and poignant commentary from someone that is truly in touch with the global environment. Rowell is one of the great nature photographers, and this is a stunning collection

This book is excellent reading for "armchair enthusiasts", serious mountaineers, or anyone in between. Before reading this book I did not even know who Anatoli was. Now, I see him as one of the true great mountaineers. I really related to his feelings for the mountains, and I share many of his philosophies regarding climbing. Reaching the summit is not success; to be successful, you must make it safely down. Even if Mallory and Irvine reached the summit of Everest, they didn't achieve success by living to tell about it.
As a mountaineer and author myself, I was very pleased how easy I could relate to Anatoli's feelings and philosophies about the sport of mountaineering. On page 123 he states that he treated the mountains "like cathedrals where worship gives you strength and strips off the scale of ordinary life." He also told a different version of the accounts of the disastrous climbing month in May 1996 on Mt. Everest, which catapulted high altitude mountaineering to the front pages of newspapers around the world. I still view Reinhold Messner as the best mountaineer of all time, but had Anatoli lived longer he would have surely closed the gap.

TJ Burr
Mountaineer/Author
"Rocky Mountain Adventure Collection"

Anatoli Boukreev was one of the most remarkable mountaineers in history. This book gives the reader great insight into Boukreev's thoughts, as well as the Soviet culture. Having read many other books, the similarities between Soviet athletes, chess masters and intellectuals is stunning. Anatoli Boukreev hints at the pressure placed upon him and others prior to the fall of his government. "Above the Clouds" has excellent narratives about climbing, but it is much more than that. His writings about the Everest tragedy are striking.

This is a terrific book by one of the most famous and least-understood mountain climbers of our time. Boukreev was known to only a small group of mountaineering insiders before the publication of Krakauer's Into Thin Air and then Boukreev's own bestseller The Climb. Here, he reveals himself to be a thoughtful, poetic yet tough-minded, and extremely intelligent writer. This book not only covers adventures on Everest, Mt. McKinley, K2, Annapurna, and elsewhere, but also reveals little known and fascinating details about Russia and Kazakhstan and the USSR climbing culture in which Boukreev was raised. Anyone interested in climbing will love this book. (It has terrific photos too, most of them taken by Boukreev from the tops of the peaks he scaled.)

This book was very interesting. Not only did it have plenty of photos, the text was actually useful and have a great message. Reading Galen's work is just as great as looking at it. I had never even heard of or seen most of the places in the book until I got the book. Now, I'm walking some of the same trails I discovered in the book.

An incredible photographic argument that nature is ever-present, fecund, and indomitable! Rowell and Sewell capture the majesty of one the world's most beautiful urban areas to describe nature's ability to adapt and thrive next to mankind. A surprising array of wild animals are photographed within the ex-urban landscape and combine with dramatic Bay Area landscapes to make a compelling story of the beauty that surrounds us--if only we can take time out from our busy lives to see it! This is a great gift to bring back East for the holidays.

Galen Rowell is showing here surely the nicest landscape shots I have ever seen. The Bay Area, that I didn't know, is here in spades, and if you know a little bit of tech, you see several uses of Galen special shooting way (flash, A2 Nikon filtering, s.o.)

Willis has a genius for searching climbing literature and coming up with gripping passages to incorporate into his anthologies. Some readers will find that they already own most of the original books, making the anthology unnecessary. However, for those who only like the exciting bits, or who don't want to collect dozens of volumes, Willis' works are perfect. The latest installment continues to incorporate writings on many different climbing styles and historical periods, both fiction and nonfiction.

This is a great compilation of climbing stories. Some are inspiring while others will make you think about whether this is really something you want to be doing. Also highly recommended for those addicted to mountaineering literature is the editor's book "Epic" for more of the same...

As you can see from the table of contents and the editorial reviews, this book contains writings by lots of great mountaineers and climbers. Many of the authors discuss experiences when they have had to deal with fear, loss, and the difficult question of risk; they also share some of the lessons that they have learned from years of being challenged by nature and other people. Willis' compilation includes a selection of both fictional and true stories that I found to be a balanced combination of very funny, poignant, sad, and--best of all--inspiring. Reading this book really made me want to get outside! One of the convenient things about this book is that the stories are rather short, so it's easy to pick it up for a brief escape from the hustle and bustle of the city...There is also a bibliography so one can read further about any of the stories, if one chooses.