This is a historical approach to 27 hotels that remain ideal stopovers for celebrating the charm, folklore, rugged settings and history that typify the Rocky Mountains of North America. Included are phone numbers and addresses. Today it is possible to be a guest in a hotel that once welcomed Buffalo Bill Cody, Poker Alice, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and many other frontier characters.

These hotels still play their original roles and remain ideal stopovers for celebrating the charm, folklore, rugged settings and history that typify the Rocky Mountains of North America. It is possible to be guest in a hotel that once welcomed such frontier characters as Buffalo Bill Cody, Poker Alice, WildBill Hickok or Calamity Jane.

I found this book to be not only entertaining, but informative. It is a tour of the midwest and its vegetable gardners. Within the authors' investigation of the various gardens he finds are slices of each gardner's life and their views on the world. Each personality is shown through the garden, from a man who live in a shack and swears to letting his vegetable vines ramble wildly, to an older man who drives from his home to his plot with percise neat rows. It is also a nice compilation of gardening tips that read like a conversation with an old-timer. While reading you can almost picture these people, sitting before you and pointing out the potato bugs on the leaf, or letting the soil fall through their fingers, harvesting tomatoes, ect . . . I recommend this book because it shows pretty much why we are drawn to plant our own crops and watch them grow.

This is a genuinely disappointing text from West-Eberhard, one of the most well-respected evolutionary biologists around. It reads as if written in a bubble at STRI (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute), and from the perspective of someone unable to keep up with the explosion of information in developmental and molecular biology of the past 5-10 years. West-Eberhard never convinces me that she even understands much of the elegant work done by these scientists, or if she does, writes so poorly as to bog the reader down not so much in jargon, but poorly defined broad concepts that do nothing to advance the ideas of the book. "Development" appears as every other word in the introduction, yet exactly what the author's definition of "development" is continually eludes the reader. Couple this with the fact that it seems as though she struggled with this book for many years (a scan of the references reveals them to be sadly out of date - my quick look found the most recent to be 1997), and you have a book that may have helped shape thought in this area 10 years ago, but is simply an afterthought in today's booming expanse of scientific knowledge. I look forward to a different synthesis from someone trained as both a cutting edge devo-evo researcher as well as a thoughtful evolutionary theoretician. But this isn't it...

This book is meant to educate - to lead away from the sterile debates of causation as NATURE OR NURTURE. It is a monumental achievement by a careful thinker (recent recepient of the SSE's Sewall Wright award), and it will likely change the way you think about how genes and environments interact through development to affect phenotypic expression. If you have ever been confused about ideas in evolutionary process and how phenotypes arise, this is a book you should read. West-Eberhard's treatment of the more-difficult ideas is comprehensive - with enough examples to appeal to the backgrounds of most readers. The book is full of wonderful details of animal behavior, plant biology, the social wasps West-Eberhard has watched her whole life, and much, much more. It will spark much new research - perhaps for decades to come. It will become a citation classic. She has taken on one of the more contentious of all modern debates. For that, for her exhaustive discussion, and for the power of her conclusions, she will be criticized and rediculed. Take my advice: buy the book, read it, think about what it says, and decide for yourself . I think West-Eberhard's achievement is an awesome contribution.

Did the Boston critic fail to find his or her name cited? Perusal would have turned up references to work published in 2000,2001 and 2002. The review was not helpful!

This book is exactly what you'd expect from a book purchased at a gift shop at the Grand Canyon, bland.

It is by no-means in-depth and spends more time describing the antiques that Colter decorated her buildings with than with her life. Colter was a fascinating woman and I would have liked to learn more about her than this book provided.

Being as how Colter isn't exactly someone you're likely to read more than one book about, I would recommend purchasing something with more pictures and information than this one, which is more just a basic outline.

"Builder upon the Red Earth" is not the slick tome of expensive color photographs and analytical drawings that Mary Colter's unique contribution to Twentieth Century American Architecture deserves. However, this essentially biographical book is the only one in print showing pictures and telling the history of Mary Colters extrodinary talent.It is not clear if Mary Colter's obscurity is due to the fact that she was a woman practicing architecture in a time when the field was dominated by men or if the remote Southwestern locations of her most interesting works kept them hidden form view, but it is high time more people took a serious look at her work. Colter's projects, which are "built ruins" foreshadow the work of Western deconstructionist architects like Antoine Predoc or Tom Maine. Showing the work of Colter which is almost 80 years ahead of its time "Builder upon the Red Earth" should be in every young architects library.

Although I agree with the reviewer who says that Mary Colter deserves a far better book, I still highly recommend this one, as at least it fills in a gap that's almost the same size as the canyon where Colter's buildings still stand today. More people should read it so that some will be inspired to write more!

kind of disappointed. thought i would get a bit more food options, and traditional meals. it was worth buying but cant live with it alone.

This book is a lot of fun to read through -- you get a lot of history, with background on the culture of T&T, the origins of the T&T carnival, along with many calupso rhymes and the origins of many of the foods and recipes. I've always wanted a recipe for true Pina Coladas, and the recipe for Ginger Beer sounds more like a science experiment, but my son and I plan to try it out. Instant island vacation!