The reader gets a beautiful photographic glimpse of sub arctic Canada and an interesting socialogical glimpse of the four crew members as they make a record setting trek across Hudson Bay in a 40 foot sailboat.

The book focuses on "transition-era" (1945 - 1955: the transition from steam to diesel power) operations in one of the most interesting places for railroading: Southern Pacific's own home region of the San Francisco Bay Area. The archives are opened to deliver photographs of many interesting railroad sights now long-gone: the Oakland pier; Third St. station in San Francisco; electric street cars in Berkeley; Port Costa; etc. In this book the pictures do the talking, with minimal additional text to provide background, context and explanation. All photographs are black and white and mostly cover the SP's steam power used extensively at this time; all are of high quality and provide great insight into the realities and details of railroading during the period. The pictures also document an intriguing history of the Bay Area from a different perspective. (The pictures date from 1937 through 1957, with most in the 1945 to 1955 period.) References are provided to other publications to fill in some of the gaps not covered in this book.

For anyone interested in Bay Area Indian history, this book is a must-read. It's the only book I've found on the subject that looks comprehensively at the various tribelets in the Bay Area at the time of contact through the middle of the Mission period - very satisfying in its completeness. The one drawback is that the author's argument is not used to analyze a lot of the evidence. Most of the book is simply presented as facts, with only a few passages of analysis at the end of the chapters that tell you what the author makes of all the evidence. Otherwise it is a great read. I wish there more books like this one!

As an overseas fan of the Packers who rarely gets to see a game I found this book to be a great and easy reading account of the Packer's journey to Superbowl XX111. An excellent collection of photographs also further enhance the enjoyment of this book.

That certainly was the case with B.B. Wills. After graduating college in the early 1920's, he sought his fortune in Florida real estate boom. When that boom turned to bust in 1926, he went back home to Maryland. Luckily, because he was working primarily as an agent rather than as an investor, he lost little in Florida.

Scratching around for the next entrepreneurial idea, he decided to buy some land along the Potomac in southern Maryland, near his birthplace, and develop it into a small-scale amusement park and picnic venue. He quickly learned that many of his potential customers in Washington, D.C. were prevented from reaching his park either because the inadequate highways of the day made the journey too arduous, or simply because most of them did not own cars. Eventually, in 1934 he bought and refurbished an ancient Hudson River excursion boat (built in 1880!), rechristened it the "Potomac" and used it to ferry customers from Washington to his park.

Soon, Wills noticed that he was earning much more from fares on the "Potomac" than from admissions at his park. This lead him to close the park, sell the land and concentrate fully on excursion boats: day trips, dinner and dancing cruises, etc. He would expand his interests to include ferry service across the Chesapeake from Baltimore to the Eastern Shore (this was long before a bridge was built over the bay), ferry service to the Statue of Liberty, Hudson River cruises and service across Boston Harbor. He even briefly ran boats from various Gulf of Mexico ports and in other venues. Prior to purchasing the "Potomac," he had no knowledge of ships or navigation.

Always looking for an angle, he also took advantage of legal technicalities to run a casino boat in the Chesapeake for a time. During World War II he got around fuel rationing by successfully arguing that his excursion boats on the Potomac also provided some vital transportation links, given that there were no bridges across the river's lower reaches then. A true bargain hunter, not once did ever have a boat built for him; he always bought and refurbished older boats. The venerable "Potomac" was 68 years old when it was retired in 1948. By the 1960's, interest in excursion boats was waning, so he shut down his remaining boating ventures and redeployed most of his capital to real estate development in the Washington, D.C. area. He died in 1986, aged 89.

If the name of B.B. Wills is unfamiliar, it should be. Even at the apex of his career, he was content to keep a very low profile. Not one of his boats ever bore either the Wills surname or the first name of any member of his family. He had no interest in being a celebrity, just in making a buck relatively quietly. He became wealthy, but not extravagantly so. The antithesis of Donald Trump, if you will.

Perhaps accordingly, this book strictly deals with Wills the businessman. We learn very little about him as an individual, except through his business dealings. He was never bashful about asking to renegotiate a deal. When a car rental company tried to collect daily charges for a long-overdue car (a careless employee had damaged it and then left it in an obscure corner of the boat line's property for months), he countered with a demand for storage fees. It's hard to escape the conclusion that his work indeed was his life, and that he could be a tough cookie. Similarly, his family is treated in only the most cursory fashion. The Willses were an old-line tobacco-growing southern Maryland family, B.B.'s grandfather was a doctor and a friend of the ill-fated Dr. Samuel Mudd, B.B.'s father was involved in a variety of business pursuits, and B.B. was the only southerner in his college class at Holy Cross in Massachusetts (the Willses were Catholic; so were the Mudds, by the way). Apart from a family photo, little is said of his wife and children. This is a business history, straight up.

The book is an easy read; I polished it off in just over 2 hours. It should appeal to those who would enjoy a case study in entrepreneurship, or who have an affinity for maritime history in general or excursion boats in particular, especially those on the lines that Wills ran.

The photographs are incredible, led by a genius who needs no introduction (although, my purchase was based on a desire to collect more of unheralded Wayne Miller's photos, after encountering his stunning Chicago South Side collection). However, it's really a shame that the print and paper production is so cheap. Somebody should reissue this stuff with an eye toward quality. And if there's a photo historian out there collecting Miller's work for publication, you have a ready customer! Just please go for a quality publishing job.

I'm a native Pole, so it's easy for me to say "Milosz is great". I can read his works in the original language he has written them in, however, as person who uses the English language on the daily basis, I can also say "He is the poet of the world". In this book, Milosz shows his talent at its best. Descriptive, enigmatic and feeling. Thank you for that, Czeslaw,this books expressed your feelings so eloquently that it helped me express mine.

This extremely well-organized book has a picture of every plant listed, often several cultivars of a popular plant. It is not heavy on design or irrigation techniques, but a great source of info and photos. Even if your focus is not water conservation, this is a nice complement book to have. It is of course limited to plants that survive in the SF Bay Area, though not limited to natives.

This book compiles a wide variety of photos of finished artworks by author/artist. Watercolor is done with a light, loose touch. I have several floral books which are "realistic" in technique. Trying to do small details realistically, either drives you crazy or you love it. If you love detail, but want to loosen up alittle without looking messy in your technique, this book has some good examples. The book doesn't give detailed "step by step" illustrations but it is fairly easy to see how most of the effects were achieved.

Those who know and love the Chesapeake and its tributaries can never get enough reading about it, its people, and its vanishing ways. They will get all that and more in this one, because it is viewed through the loving eyes of a fine, articulate writer. Along the way, even old Bay hands will pick up lots of new information about people and places they thought they knew. And it's done up in short, article-length segments so that you can put it on your night-stand, read one, fall asleep, and look forward to the next night As for the writing, start out with the story about "Walter Coles", then start at the beginning of the book, and read that one again. 'Nuff said.