After reading the first volume, it was hard tobelieve that there were so many more great people stories about the historical Sierra mountains: miners, badmen (and women), and people of great achievements. A well-written, fun set of stories all true.

This book has 59 tours in the Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Park areas and around Huntington Lake. Describes some beautiful country. Each tour is rated with difficulty, length, elevatnion, navigation, time, and season. The USGS topos for the tour are listed, along with excellent tour maps. Each tour has a description of what you see, where to start, and leads you thorough the tour.

I like the book, but I would also like to see an index and more tours for the Yosemite high country.

This book has 59 tours in the "central" Sierra Nevada of California. That is, the beautiful but less-visited area between Lake Tahoe/Donner Pass to the north and Yosemite to the south. Each tour is rated with difficulty, length, elevatnion, navigation, time, and season. The USGS topos for the tour are listed, along with excellent tour maps. Each tour has a description of what you see, where to start, and leads you thorough the tour.

The only thing I think is missing would be an index, but that wouldn't stop me from buying the book.

The Eastern Sierra is an excellent, but underappreciated area to ski. The cold east side has fresher snow than the western side of the Sierra. However, since there's only one main road (395) and few passes open in winter, it's not visited a lot.

The book covers 78 tours in 184 pages in the Eastern Sierra/Owens Valley area from Bridgeport (N. of Mono Lake) south to Bishop Creek. This includes the Mammoth area and Rock Creek area, both with developed and backcountry XC ski areas.

It's a great book, but I wish it had an index. The Tioga Pass area could use more coverage. But what it does cover still makes it a terrific guidebook!

I tried to read this late at night in a guest room in Palo Alto (while I was still on Eastern time), at a house where I was also urged to read _Up and down California_, the narrative based on Brewer's own letters, still in print (first edition 1930). I got the latter via interlibrary loan but the memory of Alsup's vistas of rock has brought me to Amazon to buy my own copies of both.

It's nice to see Tim Hauserman come out with a guide to the Tahoe Rim Trail so soon after the trail's completion. The Tahoe Rim Trail is destined to be one of the elite distance hikes in the West, right next to the High Sierra Trail, John Muir Trail, and Skyline to the Sea Trail. Having been to the Tahoe area, and recently finished reading the guide, I am already planning a thru hike on the trail for next year.

This book has a number of excellent features. The use of Tom Harrison maps (and the expertise of Jeffrey Schaffer) in the trail description chapters give the prospective hiker far more detail than typical guidebooks do. This is especially important in planning the logistics of a 150+ mile hike. In addition, Hauserman has done an excellent job of breaking the trail down into managable day-hikes and/or overnight trips. Those who, like my wife, want to complete the trail in 2 or more summers will find his organization useful. Finally, the trail description of each segement begins with helpful notes on water sources, camping locations, etc, which will greatly assist both thru hikers and those sampling the trail on a day hike.

If the book has a problem, it is the amount of space it devotes to introducing the Tahoe area and the trail. Less than half the book is devoted to trail description. While the rest of the material made for fascinating, and sometimes funny reading (Hauserman has a great sense of humor) it does add to the weight of the book. I appreciate this in my armchair, but will undoubtably be less happy with it on the trail. Other Wilderness Press Guides to similar sized trails are more compact (and still have great maps). Despite this small criticism, the book is an excellent buy and Hauserman has done a good job summarizing what will surely be one of the premier hiking trails in the years to come.

The author relies on Austin's newspaper (no longer in print) called the Reese River Reveille to describe what every day life in Austin was like, from its founding in the 1860s to about the 1950s. Most of the book focuses on the 1860s, when Austin was founded as a mining town. The book then discusses its growth and development, the struggles of its inhabitants in an isolated location, and the hopes for Austin's own "place in the sun" as a premier western town.

The book is easy to read and very enjoyable. Having spent about a month in Austin this summer, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book in my college's library. Recommended for anyone interested in frontier history.

The challenge of cardcounting is not learning to do it, but "conning" the pit personnel into letting you do it.

I was the stereotypical counter till I read this book (felt guilty, avoided contact with pit supervisors, neglected value of rapport with dealers). The result was very quick shuffles and even being told not to make any more blackjack bets.

Since I have adopted the mind set described in this book and the resultant behaviors, (engage pit personnel in conversations that interest them, appear to play just for fun and the money means nothing, dress like you can afford to lose) I have enjoyed deep penetration into single decks for multiple hours at a time (the difference that makes the difference).

I agree with the top authors on the game that this is the best book on casino comportment and developing your "act".

How to get there, what to bring; maps, and "RVAlerts" to indicate roads or terrain that could create problemsfor RVers...Very useful information.

I could not put "Prey" down and read it the day I got it, but when it was over I had to scratch my head. The concept is gripping (if self-plagarizing), but the characters are perfunctory and the narrative is as much about story-boards as story-telling. Invoking all the usual Crichton themes, "Prey" involves another tale of corporate greed causing scientists to tinker with nature, only here the creatures are "nanoparticles" rather than dinosaurs. (Didn't any of these greedy corporate scientists read 'Jurassic Park'? Or Frankenstein, for that matter? Don't they know that nature will not be harnessed and controlled?). The particles are a combination of genetic engineering and computer programming, and behave something like the angry swarms in the 1986 horror movie "From Beyond." Crichton is a great teacher, as usual, popularizing cutting-edge technological and scientific theories enough to make the reader feel smarter than the characters, and the story moves briskly and efficiently to a (mostly) satisfactory conclusion. But in the end, "Prey" is a carnival fun ride of a book -- enjoyable but somewhat pointless.

As part of a broad public discussion, not a specifically scientific one, Michael Crichton reaches into the deep thick darkness of our future with his new book, "Prey," and viscerally pulls out some issues, some potential realities, with his poetry-prose, that are so central to our continued breathing and cognition that we are well advised to ignore the obvious scientific weaknesses of many parts of this book. The issues he brings up include the development of nano and bio technologies, artificial life, and swarm and emergent behavior.
The plot of "Prey" is formulaic in many respects, following closely in the footsteps of books such as "Frankenstein," which was the first real story about artifical intelligence, "2001: A Space Odyssey" and, of course, "Jurassic Park."
In ignoring these varied faults, as we read "Prey," we sit quietly on this beautiful dark night and get a glimpse of the deeper issues that glimmer, simmering, on our nearest horizon.

This book, which I hope gets turned into another Crichton blockbuster, shows how dangerous things will get in the near future.

Michael Crichton says in the introduction to the novel: "Sometime in the twenty-first century, our self-deluded recklessness will collide with our growing technological power. One area where this will occur is in the meeting point of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and computer technology. What all three have in common is the ability to release self-replicating entities into the environment."

This idea that we will soon have weapons that can make copies of themselves is troubling!

One of the last sentences of the novel says: "'They didn't understand what they were doing.' I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race."

Michael Crichton is obviously warning us that weapons that can make copies of themselves could cause the DEATH of the human race. Powerful stuff!

I actually got my book for free since I am a member of the Lifeboat Foundation. They are taking his book so seriously that they are trying to get some people off the planet before this weapon is unleashed!

A nonfiction book that discusses such dangers is "Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century-On Earth and Beyond" by Martin Rees. I recommend this book as well!