is what Shirley Frondorf does in her "after the fact" narrative of the famous Steinberg trial in Scottsdale, Arizona. Along the way, she gives those of us who have visited or lived in Scottsdale a good feel for what it was like in the '70's. The book appears to be an accurate accounting of what can happen when the victim is put on trial in criminal court and the prosecutor underestimates the defense. Although that is the primary reason for Steinberg going free from his brutal crime, Frondorf accurately describes all the lucky coincidences that fell into place in this miscarriage of justice. I can only imagine what it must be like to be one of the "players" in this story to review the events as detailed in the book. The shame and denial that must take place for the defense witnesses and the officers of the court that allowed such a farcical outcome are too hard to imagine. An interesting read regarding small town justice, compulsive gambling, and complete with some human interest pictures from the events, the "Dof a JAP" will hold your interest and make you wonder for years to come.

This book is simple, short, and easy to understand. It is about a runaway greyhound lost in the desert, and how he survives the many dangers there. It is full of action. I suggest it to young animal lovers or anyone who wants a good, quick book to read.

This is a good sightseeing guide that should help anyone who is interested in traveling the States of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico by car.

Even if you know you want to see the Grand Canyon, what else do you do in the Northern Arizona / Southern Utah area? This book answers that question.

Arranged by state, the book highlights different attractions in each area. It also suggests driving loops, designed to hi-light the highlights while traveling a circular route along major highways. This is certainly designed well for someone who is unfamiliar with the area and wants a travel itinerary laid out with suggested sights and attractions.

Accommodations or restraints are not listed, so one would have to look to another guide or the internet for those. This book can get you started with your destinations, however.

Ann Haymond Zwinger has contributed her scientific expertise to subsidized, multi-week inner-canyon environmental impact expeditions, has run each of the Canyon's rapids countless times (in nearly each month of the year), in every sort of water craft. What her scientific eye takes in, her pen transmutes into its own river of irresistible prose, carrying the reader, willing or not, from one chapter to the next. As a hiker, I expected the vision of a "boat person" to suffer from its constricted horizons. A bottom-up myopia. Instead, we find ourselves soaring with eagles. We climb cliffs, clawing our way through a darkness of thorns and pain. We crawl along brushy beaver tunnels. We ponder the local history and lore...and the primeval past. Our journey evokes visions of thousand foot-high lava dams filling the entire Canyon with water, as well as today's horror of a rapid at Lava Falls. While some of her snippets of local human history are rarely mentioned in other books about the Canyon, Zwinger's forte is in the natural sciences. In that arena, she has no peer among Grand Canyon authors. Since this is not a trail manual, it is not easy to restrict one's reading to a single, specific Canyon location. Rather, the chapters are organized by seasons of the year. No matter. If you start at the beginning, its 220 or so pages of narrative will sweep you into their main current and, well... I'll see you below the rapids.

27-year-old Calvin Duggai, found not guilty of five manslaughter charges by reason of criminal insanity, has been committed indefinitely to a Californian hospital for the criminally insane. A Navajo Indian, he had gone with five companions (one from another Indian tribe) into the Mohave Desert to look for brass shell casings ejected from Air Force planes during gunnery practice, and had driven out of the desert, stranding his companions there without water after a quarrel with the other Indian about whose witchcraft was stronger. Duggai had stranded them there to test whether the other Indian's magic could help them survive there.

The mental hospital is pure hell for Duggai, who feels even more degraded and humiliated in that environment than he would have in a prison. It is especially alien to him, as an Indian who is expert in living in wild country.

Five years after being committed, he manages to break out after being transferred to a lower-security facility - and he has one thought in his mind: to wreak vengeance on the four psychiatric witnesses at his trial whose testimony sent him to the hospital.

In accordance with a carefully laid-out plan, he steals a pickup truck with a camper mounted on the back, and in turn visits the residences of the four people concerned, bailing them up at gunpoint, binding their hands behind them with coathanger wire and herding them into the camper, where he secures them hand and foot to fixtures and gags them, and locks them in: there is not the slightest chance of them escaping.

Four prisoners, with obvious tensions simmering between them: Jay and Shirley Painter, whose marriage is falling apart; Sam Mackenzie (the main viewpoint character of the novel), half-Navajo and with an attraction for Shirley, which resulted in his wife committing suicide; and Earle Dana, the psychotherapist and writer whom the others regard as something of a quack, at whose dinner party things finally blew up between Jay and Shirley, which is what precipitated Audrey's suicide.

Duggai drives the four of them in their mobile prison cell deep into the desert, where he releases and unties them, strips them naked and leaves them completely without any provisions whatsoever. He drives off, having used his revolver as a club to break Earle Dana's leg, thus leaving him immobile; but occasional distant growls suggest that the pickup camper is not far off, and that Duggai wants to watch them die, like a vulture.

No-one could possibly survive in such a desert naked and totally without any equipment; but they manage to survive with very nearly nothing: their only tools to begin with are a folded plastic raincoat which Mackenzie managed to kick out the camper door as Duggai escorted him out, some brass ammunition shells he finds in the desert, which can be converted to knives, and Shirley's long hair, which has numerous uses. With this slender base, they manage to obtain ground water, using the raincoat to build a solar still, and to kill jackrabbits and lizards for food, whose body parts then give them further tools; and from there they make amazing achievements as they survive for day after day while working out what to do long-term.

Eventually Mackenzie and Jay decide to hike out to the nearest highway perhaps a hundred miles away, taking half the raincoat, and all the time trying to evade the watching Duggai with his gun at the ready. They seem well on the way to freedom when they are confronted by Duggai, put into the pickup camper, and taken right back to where they began and stripped of everything again, including the plastic - and it seems they have to start all over again. Mackenzie's hopes, as increasing weakness and delirium overtake him, of overpowering Duggai and having his own revenge seem more distant than ever....

The survival situation in the novel is probably the tightest I have ever read: four people, one with a broken leg, totally naked and without supplies (except for the couple of items they manage to scrounge) in an extremely harsh desert landscape described as "surrealist" - with a gunman hovering around who won't let them hike out. Surviving even a single day appears to be impossible; yet they survive amazingly long, and the novel shows great ingenuity in describing how they do this.

I have a couple of gripes about the novel. One is that the author gets the phases of the moon wrong: he describes a new sliver of moon rising early in the night, and later on standing overhead in the middle of the night. This is impossible: a thin sliver of moon has to be close to the sun (that's why you only see the small sliver), and therefore it can only be overhead in daylight, and can only be in the east either just before or just after dawn. Making it a nearly-full moon would have solved this problem, but would have made things too visible at night and caused problems with the plot, which at times relies on the near-invisibility of things by starlight only.

The other gripe is that the geography of the desert landscape is not clearly described, so I could hardly visualize it, and found it very difficult to follow some of the action, which relied strongly on the layout of things, especially when characters tried to navigate their way to a given destination without being seen by Duggai.

Other than these things, however, the novel is very clever and quite readable, and integrates well the tensions between the characters with the mounting urgency of their increasingly desperate struggle to remain alive.

My Pan paperback copy of this novel is simply called "Fear", but research on the Internet shows it to be the same book. "John Ives" is a pseudonym for Brian Garfield, and the book was reissued in 1985 under his own name.

There is no current book available that discusses the plants of this state. I believe the last comprehensive book was printed in the 70's. This is a good comprehensive guide with many colorful photographs, and lots of good information.

Fishing Arizona presents the reader with a substantial grip on fifty fishing locations within three regions of Arizona. Information that is specific to each location includes species of fish that are availible, general information about the location, as well as some honorable fishing spots. Although the information is intended toward the amateur angler, even the expierienced fisherman can use the information to his/her advantage.

Like a cheerful, well-mannered hotel concierege, this book provides sound, mostly accurate, but impersonal, information. And like all other Fodor guides, it's organized in a logical, formulaic, and generic fashion.

It's really several guidebooks in one. The first is a splashy, saturated color, quasi-National Geographic booklet for the attention-deficit reader. The second, meatier section, has quiet prose, lots of lists, gray, incomprehensible maps. The final section--Background and Essentials--is the most thoughtful and complex. You can really sink your teeth into the first two essays in this chapter covering the geography, geology, climate, and anthropology of the region. The small Rand McNally map is ok, and will probably be perfectly adequate for a short trip.

This guide provides all the information that you will need for an initial visit to the grand canyon. Both the North and South Rims are covered in some detail and although someone seeking a back-county guide may be disappointed, the average visitor should find more than enough material to plan and enjoy their visit.

As a former educator and current author, I really enjoyed this book. There is so much you can do with the 2 tiered writing style in teaching kids. This approach lets the book grow with your child. The pictures, by Katherine Larson, are filled with great details too. Sleeping Bear Press is doing a whole country's worth of these books and if they're as information packed as this one, they'll make great tools for learning.