There's a lot of information in this book. Unfortunately, in this book the author promotes the use of techniques that permanently scar the very canyons he claims to want to protect. How absolutely absurd is it to chop a big hole into pristine sandstone instead of using natural anchors that are just a foot or so away! I personally would recommend boycotting this book. But since that won't happen (there really IS a lot of information in this book), I hope readers will be more careful than Mr. Kelsey's new book when it comes to the environment.

This was the most irritatingly written novel I've ever read. Not being the type to easily give up on a book, I decided to give it 100 pages to see if it improved; I gave up on page 44, but before I did I scanned pages further along to make absolutley sure. Now, some would argue that I hadn't give the book enough time to develop, but to be frank, the writing was so bad, I had to stop for the sake of my sanity. I was going to put the book up for sale on Amazon.com, but there appears to be a glut of used copies of this book. I wonder how many others felt the way I did.

This book was terrible. I couldn't finish it. The dialoge was sophomoric. There wasnt any character development. A complete waste of time.

One can only hope the the Last Canyon is Mr. Vernon's last book. Flat characters; flat imagery; sophomoric dialogue; silly, forced, disconnected scenes: the genuis here is that one truly celebrates the end of Powell's journey becasue it also coincides with the end of Mr. Vernon's prose. One wishes Mr. Powell's journey had ended 300 hundred pages sooner.

I picked up this book because it was about the land from Santa Fe to Utah via southwestern Colorado. Lands that I live in, have lived in, and haved camped and hiked. Instead I found a book that failed to describe these beautiful and often harsh lands, brought in a cast of characters that added nothing to the nothing plot, and was discriminatory to the Ute Indians. I tried to count all the "cliches" used, but lost interest as fast as I lost interest in the book. The book is labeled a historical novel; try hysterical novel. Glaring errors like building a bridge over the Colorado River in Utah with fir trees. Maybe that's why you can't find any now, they were all used for this bridge. Some books you just can't put down. This book I should never have picked up.

Unfortunately, Ralph Compton's writing is being compared to Louis L'amour but whoever is making the comparison forgot one important characteristic of L'amour: he knew what and where he was writing about. For example, Compton would have the reader believe that the Colorado River in the deep canyons of Utah can be bridged in one-two days with (in reality) non-existent timber and that the Green River seems to run east-west. The dialogue is terribly simplistic. The characters are poorly developed and often inconsistent. The ending reveals no satisfactory (believable?)tension or resolution in the story line which practically dissolves before you can even turn the pages.

Not the best Compton I have ever read, but his Trail Drive series books I highly recommend.

There are at leat two definite impact structures on the Colorado Plateau: The Meteor Crater (Barringer Crater) in Arizona, and Upheaval Dome in Utah's Canyonlands National Park. I expected a somewhat detailed treatment of these features, and didn't get it.

I also expected some discusssion of impact features in arid areas in general. I didn't get that, either.

What I did get, and didn't want, was a thin, generalized history of the Colorado Plateau in terms of stratigraphic horizons, something any general textbook on the region would have provided. I feel the title of the work was highly deceptive, and I am sorry I bought what amounted to a duplicative text.

There are far better, more specific text on the Colorado plateau. Buy one of those, and leave this one on the shelf, or in Amazon's stocks. Not recommended.

The plot concept was strong but I became lost in rhetoric and description. The author enjoys certain liberties for decscriptions that hurt the overall imagery of the piece. Overall I found it to not be a waste of time but caused my time to be wasted in excessive wordings.

To sum it up - I completely agree with the below review. I am extremely disappointed with this book. The side-ways format makes for very difficult reading! I will be returning it! Save your money and look up the same info on the web.

Billed as a "Guide to Mexico's Copper Canyon", the author offers no more than a "Reader's Digest version" of information that could be easily found in the encyclopedia or free travel brochures.

It's as if there just isn't much of a story to tell, either in words or in pictures. One would expect more than just a color book cover. Instead, every other page contains only black-and- white photography, much of it poor quality. For example, the inside back cover caption reads: "Creel on a hot summer's day" and shows a photo of a dog casting a shadow against a white stucco wall. The book is designed in a difficult-to-read sideways format in a large unattractive typeface with few words to the page and very large margins. What little information the author does share with the reader could easily have been obtained with minimal research.

Information on the Chihuahua-Pacifico railroad is limited to two pages on the construction history. As a guidebook, the essential information readers would be searching for remains illusive. The only useful information contained in the book outlined the train line mileage markers and the corresponding sights. This information, too, was presented in such an abbreviated version that it was of minimal use for planning purposes.

One of the bright spots of the book was near the end as the author describes a Christmas celebration at a Tarahumara Indian Church.

I was very disappointed in this book due to the fact that the first 155 pages are devoted to a negative discourse on why amature, as well as professional rock art enthusiasts, are foolish and wrong in their attempts to make sense of, and understand what these ancients were trying to tell.

The second half of the book contains a very nice, brief description of the most well known rock art sites throughout the greater four corners area. The short descriptions are accompanied by well presented black and white photos representing type examples of petroglyphs in each area.

The book contains some useful information if one can glean it from the negative dialogue.

Being a geology maven, I am loathe to pan a book on my favorite subject, but it must be done here. This book is very amateurish, displays no sign of proofreading, and is horrendously inaccurate on any of a number of fronts. The writer has utterly no idea of how to prepare a geographically accurate map of large-scale features, frequently misspells ordinary place names, makes great misstatements of fact, particularly in the area of lists of features, such as the names and diameters of meteoritic impact structures, and glosses over or ignores numerous fundamental geologic rules and precepts.

Up to now, I have had a tremendous regard for Facts on File as a publisher of books about the natural world, but the Erickson series is one that has slipped through the cracks of their quality control system, and this is one of the worst. Don't buy this book, or take it out from your library, unless you want to be greatly misinformed and an ignoramus about geology and geological features.

Dutton's 1882 Tertiary History is a literary and scientific masterpiece: those who have read Thoreau and Muir will certainly agree with Stephen Pyne that this work is more imaginative than that of the other giants 19th-century nature writing. Too, I find the prose more compelling than that of Thoreau. And while some of the science (i.e., interpretation) may have changed since Dutton's original study, the data that Dutton presents with both care and flair has not. But an extremely important part of this book is the illustrations, specifically the wood-cut lithographs of drawings by Thomas Moran and William Holmes. These were not added to the original book as flourishes; they were, in addition to their beauty, illustrations of the scientific and aesthetic points Dutton was making in the text. Looking at an 1882 original, or even at the 1977 Peregrine Smith reproduction, one discovers these illustrations to be a delight: the capabilities, even in a black-and-white lithograph, to produce subtleties of light and shadow are astonishing. Not so in this UofA Press production. Their lack of care in figure replication and in overseeing the printing process has ruined most of the beauty of the lithographs: most are so over-inked that much of the detail is lost and the figures seem dull and lifeless. In fact, many of these lithographs are better replicated in the...Penguin Nature Classics paperback version of John Wesley Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River. UofA Press has done a great disservice to an important work. Save your [money]. Go to a library and delight in one of the earlier versions. Too, the entire Atlas that accompanied the monograph can be viewed on the WWW through the Library of Congress site.