This coffee table book from Hallmark (one of the largest companies based in KC) delivers a beautiful pictorial overview of the Kansas City metro area, including all of the key attractions. I received this as a gift and am proud to display it in my home.

This is a book of various writings and pictures. Although reading many of the documents in this book can be boring, the summations of each are excellently done. Little boons like excerpts of the CIA pamphlets that educated Contras, or how the Andrews Sisters plagarized a Latin song, makes this an interesting hodge-podge.

Even though the latest edition was published in 1975, Light's manual is still a "must have" for the west coast naturalist. This book contains taxonomic keys and information about the majority of intertidal invertebrate animals that live along the California Coast.

The keys have supplementary illustrations that help the reader figure out what animal is in their bucket, or in the tide pool at their feet.

There are entries that are unavoidably out of date due to the publication date. The reliability and usefulness of the taxonomic keys and supporting information in this book, however, still ring true.

A wonderful reference book to the invertebrates of California.

The only reason I didn't give the book 5 stars was that its publication year (1975) is causing its contents to slip out of date.

Anyone up for putting together a new edition?

Twenty-five years of world history are presented in brief interviews in this collection recounting the first 25 years of National Public Radio's history. From the 1971 May Day demonstrations against the U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam -- the first day of broadcasting for All Things Considered -- to 1994's ushering in the start of a new era of American prosperity, "Listening to America" gives first-hand accounts of history in the making.

The interviews reproduced in this book are fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the interview with the Americans freed after two years being held hostage in Iran, as well as the interviews with the engineers for the Space Shuttle just days following the catastrophic explosion of the Challenger, which was launched against the advice of the engineers.

"Listening to America" also gives a good overview of the feelings of the "men-and-women-on-the-street" on issues such as elections, the Gulf War, and the trial of Patty Hearst.

My only disappointment with this book was their super brief mention-in-passing of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I would have liked to see more detail of the emotion that many American's on NPR's call-in shows would have had when that news was announced.

Reading "Listening to America" is a good way to brush up on the important events of the latter part of the 1900s. I'm glad that I took the time to read this. I found myself learning a lot more about events that happened while I was too young to bother with the newspaper or evening news. The 1970s pictures of Cokie Roberts, Robert Siegel, Linda Wertheimer, Ira Flatow, Bob Edwards and Nina Totenberg are also a treat!

we bought this book at pictured rocks national lakeshore halfway through a 17 day adventure visiting all of the great lakes and i wished we had found it sooner. it was helpful with its details and little bits of trivia and information. for example we were not surprised to see the horrible cooling towers adjacent to indiana dunes nat'l lakeshore and it helped us understand the different mindset of the "yoopers" in michigan. i was disappointed that it did not contain more info on the canadian side of the great lakes and it made no mention of lake ontario and new york (our starting point), which seemed to short change the title of great lakes. (afterall, how could it miss one?) if you're aware of this and want some great info on a great region...i defnietly recommend it!

This book consists of a collection of five scholarly papers delivered at a symposium held in 1992, plus the notes for an exhibition held at the time. The primary focus is Spanish exploration, though Mexican and other European perspectives are addressed. Many of the maps accompanying these texts are fascinating, though a few are poorly reproduced. The quality of the papers varies; some authors confuse matters by describing maps that are not shown. The book includes a center section of colored plates. This is a work aimed at specialists.

This valuable balance of forces compendium had been missing in action for a few years. Prepared as always under the auspices of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, this respected annual has been published irregularly over the past 10 years resulting in some overlap, chronological lapses in coverage and staleness of data. Nonetheless the appearance of MEMB has always been worth the wait. The previous edition covered only through 1998 and the manuscript-to-press time frame effectively rendered it the 1997 yearbook.

I was very pleased to find this reference once again available, this time from MIT Press and at a much more reasonable price than earlier editions, which were bordering in the $100 range.

The meat of the book is the 330+ pages of tables showing country-by-country inventories. This, as before, is quite detailed and I believe that the background of the editors inspires trust that this data is in fact accurate as of late 1999 as is claimed in the preface. After leafing through the 133 pages of Qualitative anlaysis -- the first part of the book, I was just a tad disappointed. The writing is incisive as always, however the earlier editions (besides having maps, not in the current version) gave more emphasis on what you might call the socio-economic/political context, to coin a jawbusting Poli-Sci phrase. I didn't find enough discussion of internal politics and international diplomacy including the role of the US and the other power-brokers. After all, a significant role in the power balance is played by the reliability of outside arms suppliers and the diplomatic restraints on the arms trade.

The introductory essay lays out some trends in a general way, but the chapter on the Balance of Land Forces comes closest to the usefulness of the earlier editions. I say that because the author tries to show a dynamic balance by setting up scenarios. Of course scenarios can get dated very quickly in the Middle East (witness the sudden Israeli pullout from Lebanon and the death of Assad). However the main idea of the qualitative essays should be (and used to be) to flesh out the book's bean-counting inventories by matching up the various users of these inventories in likely settings. Even in the land forces chapter, some of the earlier discussions of "things that can go wrong" is missing.

The chapter on the Balance of Air Power seems meaty enough, but the qualitative analysi is based on formulas not quite well explained enough for this reader. I can crunch numbers reasonably well but need a bit more explaining than is provided in the few paragraphs devoted to discussing the derivation of the formula. The narrative does fill in some gaps, but I am not certain how these assertions are backed up, since, as I said, I couldn't quite follow the methodology. The editor suggests that in future editions the authors will extend the formula or equation approach used for Air Forces to the land, sea and strategic missile elements as well. If so, I'd suggest that the narrative concentrate on explaining the meaning while the derivation of the formula be confined to a brief appendix or long footnote. As is, I was left a bit confused. However, it's obvious that the author has some relevant and weighty things to say about the machine-man interface.

The Naval essay handles the building and acquisition programs nicely and gives a good overview of the reasons behind the respective ship/weapons package choices of each regional power. However, I wish the author had worked out some scenarios so that the text would go beyond plain "mission statements" and get down to the likely match-ups and flashpoints.

The defense spending trends chapter does a good job of relating defense spending to the economic situations confronting each actor and the trade-offs that had to be made. However, a bit more social and domestic political background would have helped here. It's important to consider who controls the purse strings, why and what internal party conflicts drive spending patterns.

The final assessment chapter is an interesting survey of the role of the "Afganistan Alumni" in terorrist activities in the region and beyond. This chapter is very useful, given the recent headlines over the various embassy, barracks and industrial bombings.

A chapter on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would have been helpful given the centrality of this issue to a lot else going on in the central theater of the Middle East ( the Western theater being the North African countries and the Eastern theater the Gulf States.

All-in-all a creditable job, despite my cavils, and certainly worth the ( ) for anyone having an interest in war-making and peacekeeping in what is still the world's most dangerous tinderbox.

This book gives the off-road cyclist a great amount of information on a variety of trails. It covers location, length , & difficulty of the trails it reviews. There is also information about the Chambers of Commerce close to the trails. A must buy for experts & novices alike.

I thought I knew a lot about Nebraska; was I surprised! Hannah has it all! Open the book to any page and you have the things great vacations are made of...

"Oil in the Deep South" begins with a well written, enlightening, and thorough review of the early history of the petroleum industry, which is very effective in providing a context for the main subject of the book. Similarly, throughout the book, events outside of Alabama and Mississippi are discussed in context with their effect on the Alabama/Mississippi oil industry. Many maps, diagrams, and tables are very effective in enhancing the presentation. Even so, the subject matter and the detail in which it is treated makes this admirable work primarily a reference for specialists, and not a light read for a general audience. A glossary could have helped make this work a more accessible to a slightly wider audience. The limitation of the scope to "up to 1945", greatly reduces the potential utility and interest in this work. It simply leaves readers hanging. Surely one or two chapters could have brought the book up to, say 1995. Even a short "summary to the Present" of 3 or 4 pages would have been appreciated. Apparently, even the author felt this has he provides summary sentences describing the ultimate number of wells and production of fields in Mississippi subsequent to 1945 and mentions post-1945 discoveries in passing. The book concentrates on Mississippi, but covers Alabama nearly as thoroughly. There are only two petroleum fields in Florida, so the challenge to cover Florida just as thoroughly is trivial, but this challenge is not met. This neglect is also evidenced by several trivial, but annoying errors, in the discussion about Florida. Only 2 or 3 pages based on 2 or 3 readily available (free) Florida Geological Survey publications, could have made the Florida coverage comparable to Alabama/Mississippi.