Ms. Franklin's book presents a simple story of a little girl's devotion to the natural environment that existed prior to the arrival of automobiles and non-renewable resource extraction in the valley that she calls home. After the monkeys leave when their habitat is reduced from tree cutting, young Dona Marta carries on a life-long personal crusade to restore the balance that existed in her childhood.

There are several books to which this one may be compared. I do not know which comparison will resound usefully for readers of this review but such framing may help clarify the nature of The Witness. It resembles in its adventures at sea and semiotic ambages, Eco's The Island of the Day Before. It obliquely resembles in its conclusion, some of the theatrical circumstances of Unsworth's Morality Play. In its approach to a group of people encountered by Europeans, it resembles writings of Levi-Strauss, or anthropologists and mythographers of his ilk. These comparisons may not entirely indicate the quality of description in many sections of this book, nor the entrancing tale told by a young man whose voice testifies to his survival for some time as an outsider in a most curious and vibrant new world culture. The book has sexy parts and bucolic parts, character-driven excitements and pleasing resolutions to momentarily intractable mires, cannibalism and monasticism. On the whole it is a fabulously enchanting and improbable survivor's tale anachronistically enriched by wanderings in some of the many-mirrored halls of late twentieth century, French intellectualism.

This book was completely worthless to me. It has no specific information about how to file bankruptcy or avoid it. If you need someone to pat you on the back and say "everything will be all right" but not offer any constructive solutions, then this might just be the book for you. For those with more substance in mind, I would suggest one of the NOLO books. They actually know what they are talking about.

What a great book! I recommend this book to anyone who is drowning in debt. Good advice and solutions that you can put to use right away.

This book provided all the information I needed to deal with my current situation. It is very well written, and explains all the complicated issues in a clear and concise manner.

I have used Lonely Planet guides for the past 8 years during my travels everywhere from Cambodia to New Zealand to Japan, and they have yet to disappoint... until now. I'm sure that this book was once good, but it was written nearly two years ago, and Costa Rica has changed so much since then.

With the recent real estate/construction boom, this book is simply too old. I spent a month in Costa Rica (Nov./Dec. 2001) and found that in many towns HALF of the hotels and restaurants mentioned in this book no longer exist or are under new names/ownership. Also, there is a large number of new lodging places that have been built in the past years that LP excludes. Many of these are the best deals in town.

For the ones that it does include, prices are slightly outdated (although not horrible). Bus schedules are less than accurate (understandable for a two year old book). Especially in remote places like Corcovado, this book was of little help and in certain cases genuinely misleading about ways to get around and the distance of certain extended hikes.

Like I said, I use LP books all the time and they are usually great. I'm sure a 5th edition would fix 90% of the problems with this book, but until then I would strongly recommend a different publication. My friend had the Moon Handbooks guide (which I had never used before) and it was significantly better than the LP in all aspects but maps. My recommendation would be to get that book (or a different one if you know that it is newly printed) and a DETAILED map of the country. That should treat you fine until the 5th edition LP comes out.

Enjoy your trip!

I've used a couple of guide books for my trips to Costa Rica. This one was the best, It had more in it than others, and provided better discriptions that most of the others. The reviews of the places were honest and the prices were usually about right. The edition I used was a 2000 edition, I think that this is the most up to date lonely planet guide for Costa Rica, but I could be wrong. The is no guide book that has everything but this is the best I've found. If your only going to buy one guide book or if you are thinking about a trip to Costa Rica and want some information, I would highly recommend this book. The section in the back with animal descriptions is also very nice. Get the book, and the go to Costa Rica, you'll love it.

i went to langage school in alajuela, costa rica for 8 weeks and needed a good guide book. i have used/reviewed other guide books for other trips (frommers, etc) and found that this book is far better. this book is for everybody, but is realy good for budget travelers. this book includes maps of ALL the towns (small towns too!) that you want to viset! (other books dont have this!) It also lists all the information you could ever need in not only major areas, but small areas as well. negitives: sometimes its hard to find specific info without looking for a few min. (its there, just a little hard to find). And i wish a new version would come out more often. (i had no problem using my 3 year old copy though) over all this book is great and you only need to buy it and no other guide book.

I have seen some wretched books on the market in my day, but nothing, absolutely nothing, is as offensive and as crass as this. First of all, psychoanalysis is not a science, which makes these authors' approach to Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum's respective ordeals cheap enough, but even with that, it's an abomination to put two women who were victims of the Holocaust under such horrific, over-analyzed scrutiny. As Richard Nixon once said, "I don't mind when people put me under a microscope, but when they use a proctoscope, that's going too far." Indeed! This book is so bad it's unbelievable.

Denise de Costa has written a valuable and extraordinarily
intelligent interpretation of Anne Frank the individual behind the writer, as she presented herself in her original diaries and then in the revised manuscript she prepared in hiding. Reading between these texts de Costa's insights are dazzling, critical and thought provoking: she examines Anne's motivation to write, her growing dependency on the diary, her unfolding maturity and her troubled relationship with her mother. This is a compelling book and a major contribution to our understanding of Anne Frank.

the book about anne frank is truely marvalous! A wondfull biography for a teenager or young adult! Defently mworth reading!

1

I have read all of the guidebooks about Costa Rica while living in the country. Frommer's is well written and is filled with useful tips for the first-time traveller. However, Moon's Costa Rica Handbook contains at least twice the information.

This book is much better than the Adventure Guide to Costa Rica (4th Edition). I ordered them both and Frommer's contains much more detail, is in a friendlier format, and is just more professionally done. You certainly don't need both and Frommer's is the way to go. The one frustrating thing about both these books is that they always assume your (sub)trips start in San Jose! Since most tourists travel around CR, it would be nice to take the vantage point of different locales to better understand transportation options, travel times, amd tours. But this holds true for websites I've found on CR as well, so I can't fault the authors.

My family and I travelled to Costa Rica and took this book with us. I found it to be a wealth of information, especially when it came to choosing a hotel. I also enjoyed reading about the areas of the country we didn't get to visit on this trip. I especially found the selections labelled "kids" helpful when planning a vacation with my young children.

I've read this guide while living here in Costa Rica and find it paints an unrealistic picture about how easy it is to start a business. Furthermore I recently found out the author has not lived in Costa Rica for years and is somewhat out of touch with what is going on.

My wife and I have lived in Escazu, Costa Rica for years. We found this "reference" guide book to have just about all the important information newcomers need when making the move. We read this book when we first moved here and continue to recommend it to friends who are thinking about moving here. We appreciate the easy-to-read reference style of this book.

I strongly disagree with John Akins review. The over 40 pages of "starting a small business" gives an excellent overview of what a newcomer needs to know to get a small or medium business started. I didn't read one sentence that conveyed a "rosy picture" It does say how to start, what you should know, business ideas, and even gives photo's and stories of people who came and started a business. It was my favorite section.

My Heart so White was an excellent book that kept up the suspension, though there were some unnecessarily lengthy philosophical passages in it. All Souls starts off with a lot of promise, it has some witty observations about life and the meaning of life in Oxford, about English academics and their obsessions, about a foreigner trying to find his feet in that rather idiosyncratic world, and about his becoming a hunter rare books ... and one or two quite original portraits of the people that inhabit that world. But these little scattered gems of excellent writing, admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, cannot hide the fact that there simply isn't a story worth telling here. I found the hero utterly self-absorbed and not worthy of sympathy, or interest. It remains a mystery what he finds so attractive in his lover Clare, since she is very much a cardboard character. The same can be said of his academic protector, who is a jealous homosexual ... it's all too stereotyped to be believable, or worthy of our attention.
All in all a book that has some beautifully written passages but left me completely indifferent.

A devastating picture of the Oxbridge university system, with its fossilized ways, its unreal academics disconnected from the real world, the dowdy town and frowsty gown, crumbling spires and unbreakable atmosphere of privilege that the university exudes. Javier Marias knows what he is talking about for he taught there. But being Spanish, he is not in mental thrall to the very idea of Oxford (or Cambridge) the way most Anglo-Saxons are.

Unfortunately, it is more of a series of vignettes than a highly developed novel but Marias approach enables him to pour barrelfuls of acid on the place. Its highpoint is the account of a supper at an Oxford college high table, that starts off well but rapidly breaks down into intellectual, moral and physical chaos. Some of the writer's aphorisms (such as the reference to Oxford being preserved in aspic, and statements like the one arguing that the city is "one of the world's cities where least work gets done, where simply being is far more important than doing") should be engraved in marble and set up in the middle of the High.

The novel won a prize back home in Spain and M/s Costa's translation is brill.

A mixture of humor and sadness guided by the plume of one of the best contemporary authors. Marias' novel is built with intelligence and amenity.

I just used this book here in Costa Rica and found that some of the info. wasn't correct. As the Residents Asociation states the cost of living is much higher than as described in this book.

My wife and I found this guide covers the important topics for newcomers making the move. The chapters on starting a small business and stories about foreigners living there were helpful to us.

Great Book! The self-guided tour chapter was very helpful. I thought the book in general had very useful information. I also liked the chapters "Starting Small Business". What we liked most was that it was a straight forward reference book without the "fluff" found in some of the other books.

After having read the "Club Dumas" without having been able to put it down, I compulsively reached for the Flanders Panel.

It is also a very well written, enjoyable book to read. Perez-Reverte's style is not presumptuous, and at the same time, filled with rich details woven into a great plot line and real characters.

However, the detailed representations of the chess game may make it a difficult read for some. If you don't enjoy the game analysis (for the author actually employs diagrams and move lists), I suggest you skip those sections. The story will still make sense, although a lot of the symbolism will be lost. If you enjoy the game, by all means, read this book. I had not played in a long time, but the book made me dust off my chess set. Perez-Reverte succeeds in bringing the game, and a murder plot symbolized in the chess pieces, to life like the "Flanders Panel" brought the depicted scene to life with its realism.

The Flanders Panel is a fascinating mystery which is packed with riddles, puzzles and allusions. The plot rapidly swings into motion when the protagonist, Julia, who has been commissioned to restore a 15th Century painting, discovers a hidden inscription which poses the question, "who killed the knight?". The painting depicts a nobleman and a knight playing a game of chess. Through consultation and research, Julia identifies the people depicted in the painting, learns that the knight died under suspicious circumstances and figures out that the answer to the question lies in the chess game depicted in the painting. Julia enlists the help of several friends in her efforts to solve the riddle. One by one, those helpers die violent, all-too-co-incidental deaths.

This sinister novel is exceedingly well done. Large sections of the book are devoted to analysis of chess problems and interpretation of medieval Flemish art. To my utter astonishment, these sections are so vivid and so expertly crafted that they are the highlights of the book.

The characters in the book are, almost without exception, flatly-drawn with little or no depth. This is in such stark contrast to the descriptions of the chess games that I couldn't help but wonder if the author intended the contrast. One of the recurring motifs in the book is the confusion between reality and the reflected image in a mirror. Here, the players are flat while the chessboard becomes multi-dimensional.

I rated this book four stars rather than five because the characters were unengaging and unsympathetic. It was as if every person dealing with fine art in Madrid in the 1980s was self-absorbed and hedonistic. Also, the final chapter seems false and contrived. Otherwise, this is the ideal book to take along on a vacation. It is a highly entertaining book. I found it difficult to put down.

Arturo Perez-Reverte is an amazing writer, truly gifted not only in the art of spinning a creative and sophisticated mystery but also in jumping the cultural and historical boundaries.

This book (as is The Club Dumas) is a bibliomystery fan's dream come true. Julia, a woman who restores paintings for a living, is asked to help restore a fifteenth-century masterpiece, the painting depicts a chess game between the Duke of Flanders and his knight - but within it is a hidden message - Who Killed The Knight and thus the novel begins.

This book is filled to the brim with fascinating information about art, history and chess. If you liked this book you should run out and get The Eight by Katherine Neville- is another stunner!