I'm sorry to see that the 1998 tide tables have slipped to 959,464th in sales rank. I'm sure this will improve as more and more people have an oportunity to read this fine book.

I found the book very interesting from the start. The book gives the reader an overview of John C. Fremont's life, discusses some of his early expeditions then focuses on his infamous Fourth Expedition in which the subject of cannabalism is investigated.

This collection of 11 short stories set in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado is little known but well worth the readers time. There are no real heroes in the book, just a variety of men and women who are forced to deal with dilemmas we all face in our everyday life. The settings for the stories are in mountain mining towns such as Telluride, Ouray, Montrose, Gunnison, Cortez, Dolores and Norwood, Colorado. The stories are intense, frightening, honest and some come Oh so close to home. Let's look at one of them. In Toward the Sun, you have a woman dealing with the probability that the man she loves, and who loves her in his own way, is slipping away. The following description of his honesty is an example of the wonderful writing in the book. "But he cannot be dishonest. If there were a seed of dishonesty in him, he would, like an oyster, make a pearl of it. That kind of honesty is both hard to come by and hard to endure." The age old desire to change someone to fit your expectations and the possible results and cost of such change, are fit into a marvelous story which will leave you with a wider perspective of life and the choices we make. Is honesty really the best policy? Is happiness worth any cost? Nelson explores the age old dilemma of someone that has a job but no options or alternatives and tries to deal with desires and longings, as follows: "Maybe he liked the dog for his hunger: The dog had done something-he'd escaped, hidden, lived free. Marshall envied that. He had hunger too, but for what? He didn't know for what. Maybe he had hunger for hunger. He wanted to do something. Something: that didn't say much. Do what? Something besides work." This is the first book I have read by Nelson but it will not be the last. Fortunately, he has written three other novels, two collections of short stories and a host of short stories in literary magazines. He also has won a PEN fiction award and the Edward Abbey Prize for Ecofiction. This is an above average book by an above average author.

This is a fascinating book! Written as the first person reminiscences of Isaac Mylar during his childhood and adulthood between 1855 and 1880 in the quaint mission town of San Juan Bautista, California. One visualizes a droll and grizzled Mark Twain-ish narrator describing the day to day goings-on in San Juan ... an important crossroads town and stagecoach depot in old California. While being entertained by Isaac's homey narration, one learns a lot about California history. We meet the Breen family, survivors of the Donner Party, Encarnacion Sanchez, the richest woman in California, an assortment of famous outlaws including Tiburcio Vasquez, and various nineteenth century entertainers passing through on their way to the minefields. We learn about the tensions that developed in this small California town, peopled by both northerners and southerners, at the outbreak of the Civil War. And finally, we learn about the effect of the railroad on small town economies in California. I have a much better feel for California history after reading this book ... and I think you will too. I highly recommend it.

This book was one of the most important references my wife and I used on our passage from Seattle to Skagway. Not only did it give us ideas on where to go the next day, but where to hide in case the weather didn't cooperate. A must have reference for every boater cruising the Inside Passage.

Boaters around here know the Douglasses as the king and queen of cruisers, and their handbooks are our bibles. They've been everywhere, done everything, and they take *really* good notes. This guide is one result; it includes details on every anchorage, waypoint and description in the area. If you plan to spend any time in Pacific Northwest waters, this book is a must have.

I have cruised several seasons to Southeast. This is the best guide.

'A Favored Place' is a highly complex analysis of wetland history, tracing its development through pre-Columbian times to the present. This is no easy task. Siemens' book guides us through detailed archaelogical aspects, how Spanish conquerors 'read' the land they found themselves in on the Mexican Gulf coast, what a nineteenth century German colonist saw, and how twentieth century planners thought and proposed to do with 'unfavourable' wetlands. Siemens presents us with a rich and elaborate text, which will be obliged reading for specialists (especially historians, and geographers), but also a delight for a more general public interested in the way perceptions diverge over what is desirable and/or feasible when we come up against such troublesome concepts as traditional and modern. Even though the book abounds in complex technical and methodological questions, amply backed up by maps, illustrations, photographs, and diagrams, Siemens has an enviable command of language, thus permitting the lay reader easy and enjoyable access to the mysteries of what has so often been considered 'unfavourable', but after this re-reading turns out to be 'favourable': that is, flooded bottom-lands. At the end of the day, no preconceived view of the subject escapes Siemens' scalpel.

"The Forts of Old San Juan" is the official National Park Handbook for touring Castillo de San Felipe del Morro and Castillo de San Cristobal in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The former, known as El Morro, was designed by Juan Batista Antonelli and built by 18th-century engineers. The fort covers over 5 acres and had the primary responsibility for defending the harbor of San Juan, doing so with batteries of cannon on four different levels. The latter, San Cristobal, is the largest of the San Juan forts, covering 27 acres, and protected the city's landward approaches. I wish I had this booklet when I visited the forts a couple of years ago because while visitors had a sense that these were an imposing pair of defensive positions, you get a more sophisticated understanding from reading it.

This booklet is divided in three parts: Part 1, Old Forts in a Modern World establishes the key idea that in fortifying San Juan the Spanish military engineers made maximum use of the city's natural defensive features and erected fortifications that controlled both land and sea approaches. Part 2, Gateway to the Indies provides the history of Puerto Rico and the importance of San Juan as a strategic seaport. This is where you will find a look at La Fortaleza, the first fort built to protect the harbor and city of San Juan. Small by European standards, its main purpose was to repel attacks by the Island-Carib Indians and not the Dutch (who destroyed the fort in 1625). However, it does give you a basis for comparison to the other forts. This chapter also looks at Sir Francis Drake's attack in 1595 and the Earl of Cumberland's attack in 1598 (a diagram explains how a siege worked circa 1700). Part 3, A "Defense of the First Order" explains how Puerto Rico's strategic significance compelled King Philip IV to repair and strengthen the fortifications to the massive edifices we can still see today. In 1797 the prolonged attack by General Ralph Abercromby and Admiral Sir Henry Harvey failed. However, the city fared less well when an American naval squadron commanded by Admiral William T. Sampson, including the U.S.S. Iowa, bombarded the forts.

Even though it has been a couple of years since I visited, the text is clear enough and the illustrations have enough details that it all readily came back to me. The handbook is illustrated with contemporary photographs, maps, and diagrams of the forts, along with a few historical paintings and illustrations. So if you are visiting San Juan and decide to visit the Forts of Old San Juan, pick up this handbook so you can not only understand the various architectural structures you will be seeing but also the history of the forts and the practical utility of the forts in defending the harbor and town of San Juan. If you have visited other National Parks and picked up other handbooks then you already know these are high quality efforts.

Dr. E. San Juan, Jr., former chair of the department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University, is a world-renowned scholar, cultural critic and clearly the most versed in the analysis of neocolonial relations between the Philippines and the United States. This book, by far, has provided the most in depth coverage on the Filipino American community by tracing the historical legacy of famous Filipino American pioneers like Carlos Bulosan, Philip Vera Cruz, and other Filipino Americans. While providing a beautiful presentation of Philippine American relations and the dynamic of the Filipino American being, the underlying tone of the book suggest that the Filipino American phenomenon is a historical one, which is rooted in the oppressive stronghold of U.S. imperialism. Furthermore, that Filipino Americans are a byproduct of those relations, and are, in fact, economic exiles in a land that produced the economic strife they lived in. Today over eight million Filipinos live outside of the Philippines in almost every country on the planet, with a little more than 3 million of them living in the United States. Forced into economic exile because of displacement and poverty created through U.S. imperialism, Filipino Americans should not forget the past they have been dislocated from, through the journey of assimilating into American reality. But they should re-member, restore, and remap their understanding of Philippine-US relations and see how they factor into the equation of global imperialism.