When Miners Sang by Gage McKinney is a terrific book for anyone interested in Christmas music, folk music, California history, mining history, or the history of the Cornish in Grass Valley. There is something of interest for almost anyone. The book is clearly well researched, complete, scholarly, and thoroughly documented. The marvelous thing is - it is also a compelling narrative written with style and brio. I found it to be both an enjoyable and an informative read.

Fascinating accounting of local history! While covering the facts about the singing group over many years, the author has given us a picture of the lives of Cornish people who traveled around the world to settle in a small foothill gold mining town in California. Recently the connection has been made back with families in Cornwall to complete the circle. The choir has been a vehicle to tie the families together. It is so important to get these stories written down before they disappear. Thanks to Gage McKinney for doing that!

The print edition of this book is 210 pages. It's a guide to every corner of Nevada - what to see and do, where to stay, the best places to eat, the ghost towns, the mountains, the lakes the towns and the cities - with an accent on enjoying the great outdoors. The author details the best places for hiking, mountain biking, jeeping, boating and fishing, with info on all the outfitters and guides. There are 22 state parks in the state, plus 14 national recreation areas, 14 wildlife refuges and a sliver of the newest national park, Death Valley. He covers them all - what to see and do, how to get there, how to get around. Lake Tahoe and Lake Mead are covered as well. While everybody else heads for the Strip, with its faux Sphinx, plastic volcano and campy lounge acts, you can head out to the Great Basin, with this book on your laptop, where you will have the whole wild and naturally amazing state almost to yourself.

Just finished this fascinating collection of papers. Very well done and extremely readable I thought this a great find.

Mr. Moreno has a great appreciation and love for the beauty and history of northern and western Nevada, and it shows in this handy book. This is a book about exploring today's Nevada with a little history and a lot of information about over 50 day trips from the capital city.

If you are looking for a hotel and restaurant guide, look elsewhere. And Las Vegas is only a piece of Richard Moreno's story, not the focus. Clearly the author is in love with the Nevada character and he does a great job of describing a pretty interesting place.

Jack Ross is a Reno, Nevada, private eye who gets pulled into a case more out of obligation for a friend than need for business. He's asked to find a man believed to be dead for over 40 years. His search leads him through an array of characters and places that are connected by a series of events set off by a murder 40 years earlier. Bernard Schopen captures the feel of the gaming and 'anything goes' side of Nevada while giving image-provoking descriptions of the locations that capture the emptiness, diversity and beauty of Northern Nevada. A very special book.

This book provides color photographs, in-depth descriptions, and migration/nesting habits of many birds in the southwestern US.

Bird species include water birds, birds of prey, hummingbirds, songbirds, etc. that residents or visitors to the southwest may encounter.

The book is very well organized and is useful as a quick reference when viewing birds.

Las Vegas bookmaker Bruce Weinstein was immediately enamored of the diminutive brunette, Amy DeChant when he met her in October of 1995 at The Mirage poker room. He bought her a car, a beautiful diamond necklace, purchased a carpet-cleaning business for her, and took very good care of her. Bruce Weinstein, was described as "the kind guy you loved to hate and hated to love." When the wealthy, 46-year-old 300 pound risk-taker suddenly disappeared July 5, 1996 from his Las Vegas home, Amy DeChant, his 48-year-old live in lover was the prime suspect. Amy said Bruce left at 11:00pm, to go out -- but his family suspected foul play. Why? Because he was always in bed by 9 or 10, the cellular telephone that was his link to his wealthy bookmaking business remained in the house, as did his beeper and an American Express card - "He never left home without it." But how could DeChant -- at 5-foot-1 and 110 pounds, and suffering a bad hip, carry the burly body of her lover out of posh house they shared? The police listed him as a MISSING PERSON, but his family knew something was amiss. They posted a $50,000 reward leading to the recovery of Weinstein's body and arrest of the killer and hired private investigator, Mike Wysocki, to delve deeper. After the investigator discovered blood on the underside of the mattress in the bookmaker's bedroom, Las Vegas Metro began a murder investigation. The remains of the 46-year-old bookmaker were discovered Aug. 11, 1996, in a makeshift grave about 60 miles north of Las Vegas, in an isolated spot in the desert near Mesquite, where it was carefully covered with rocks. Because the body was badly decomposed, it took investigators until September to make a positive identification using Weinstein's dental records. Immediately, the investigation focused on two people: DeChant, who operated a carpet-cleaning business, and Robert Wayne Jones, her employee. Why? Amy disappeared the day after the killing and was stopped by police in Maryland. In her car was more than $100,000 in cash, false birth certificates, wigs and information on obtaining false identification. Also, police investigators found blood stains in the freshly cleaned carpets of Weinstein's home after searching for clues to his mysterious disappearance. Her brother posted a $5,000 cash bail for her after she had spent @ 2 months in jail, but after being released on bail, she fled again. DeChant changed her story several times about the events leading to Weinstein's disappearance. Her story to police now was that vindictive, masked, "New York-looking type guys" actually were the killers and they allowed her to live only if she cleaned up the bloody death scene and kept quiet. Why? Amy said the four masked men entered the house, said they were going to "teach Bruce a lesson," then killed him and took away his body (leaving some bloody spots in the house that she was told to clean). Hummm! Also missing is Robert Wayne Jones, 57, who vanished on July 12, 1996, without clothing, money, even a toothbrush. Weinstein's family has offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to his whereabouts. He was on the lam for almost a year, but was later found and arrested in New Mexico. DeChant, disappeared in September 1997 after she and Robert Jones were charged with Weinstein's murder by a grand jury. She was profiled on America's Most Wanted and a tip from a viewer watching the program led to her capture. DeChant was tracked down in January, 1998, in Port St. Lucie, Florida, where she was worked as a bartender at two South Florida establishments. She was arrested at the home of a Port St. Lucie man who ran a commercial cleaning service! At her 1998 trial, Deputy District Attorney Ed Kane portrayed DeChant as a "dominating person" who never took no for an answer and was determined to get her hands on Weinstein's wealth no matter what it took. When she couldn't manipulate control of the money from the illegal bookmaking operation, he contended, she killed him and took it. He also said Robert Wayne Jones, supplied the semi-automatic pistol that was used to kill Weinstein and helped with the clean up. The .380-caliber weapon was found under a bush a year after the slaying, but ballistic tests were inconclusive, and the weapon that killed Bruce Weinstein could have been the same make or one of three other makes... Her attorney stated in closing, that police used high-tech methods to check for blood residue in DeChant's car and carpet-cleaning van and in Weinstein's car and found nothing! The jury of nine women and three men spent 15 hours over a three-day period deliberating the murder case of DeChant and her co-defendant, Robert Wayne Jones. DeChant was found not guilty of conspiracy to commit murder but guilty of first-degree murder and of robbery with the use of a deadly weapon and was given a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Her life was spared. Jones was found not guilty of direct involvement in the murder but was convicted of being an accessory to murder after the fact, and was given a five-year sentence. Bruce Weinstein's family cried with joy after Amy DeChant, was convicted of murder in his July 1996 death. Sylvia White, Weinstein's mother, said after the verdict, "All I want to do is go to the cemetery to see my son. We don't have him anymore, but we do have justice." Will the family's joy be short lived? In May 2000, DeChant's attorney appealed the conviction citing it was impossible for DeChant, who weighs less than 120 pounds, to have shot the 300-pound Weinstein, dragged him from his upstairs bedroom, put him into a car, rolled him down a ditch in the desert and placed boulders on his head. The Nevada Supreme Court ruled in favor of Amy DeChant, overturning her October 1998 conviction for the murder of Bruce Weinstein. In their October 2000 ruling, the Justices said the trial judge erred in allowing testimony from a former homicide investigator, who termed DeChant's mob hit account a "fairy tale." The high court noted prosecutors used the same phrase later in the trial.

This 95-page publication is an informative and fascinating catalogue book published in conjunction with a Smithsonian exhibition at the National Museum of History and Technology in 1980-81. Its subject is ranchlife in Paradise Valley, Nevada, north of Winnemucca and near the Oregon border. First settled by California farmer/ranchers in the 1860s, the region's development was influenced by the Spanish colonial agricultural practices of California, and its "cowboys" have traditionally been known as "buckaroos," an anglicized rendering of the Spanish "vaquero."

Contents of the book are based on field research by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. It covers history of the region and then focuses on cowboy life and culture, including clothing, bunkhouses, and branding irons. The book contains many black and white photographs, both vintage and contemporary. Several are two-page spreads. There is also a list of 244 artifacts from the exhibition, with photos of many of them....

As of this writing...this wonderful book is out of print. If you can find a copy, it's well worth having.

This is a great guide to the abandoned mining towns littering the outback of Nevada and
California. There's more towns dead than alive out there! Modern cities and highways are shown
in black ink, and the ghost towns and historic places in red, complete with anecdotes
documenting their significance and the years they existed. Useful in combination with Delorme's
Nevada and California atlases (which you might need to actually find these towns, given the small scale of the ghost town maps).