I was disappointed that a book this size had such limited descriptions of the animals. Nearly half of each page was devoted to a map which showed the areas where the animal might be found. The pictures of the animals are black and white sketchs with no color descriptions in the text. Can you imagine trying to identify birds without knowing what color they are? If the map had been scaled down there would be plenty of room to give more detailed descriptions of the creatures. The idea is very good, but the book is a disappointment.

With regard to the above comment, I'd just like to point out that this book is an atlas of Oregon wildlife, not an identification guide. If you've ever tried to scope out the range of a species from the tiny maps in most field guides, you'll appreciate the large size of these maps.

I picked up this book based on the setting - a bookstore on the Oregon coast (a favorite of mine). And while the setting is integral to the plot, there is not much atmosphere in this book. Basically, this is a dated (written in 1973)piece. It is, if such a thing is possible, a Cold War cozy murder mystery. I like cozies and I like a good Cold War thriller (LeCarre, etc.) but for me this combination just didn't work. It lacks the cute and clever of an endearing cozy. Nor doesn't have the page turning suspense of a good Cold War thriller.

Also, don't be fooled by the title -- the cat has almost nothing to do with the book. Cat mystery fans will have much more fun with the Lilian Jackson Braun/Rita Mae Brown/Carole Nelson Douglas series.

It's true the cat in the book has almost nothing to do with the main plot, it's not about the cat. It's about people in a small, sheltered town and their reactions to what's going on. Not to mention Conan's past, and the how gossip becomes a favorite pasttime. Who doesn't want to be Miss Dobie?! After I read this first novel of a series, I had to get the others!

This is basically a list of towns in the order that
you hit them driving Hw101. Its OK if thats all
you want but don't expect much guidance on things
off the beaten track, or indeed anywhere outside
a town!

I found the Rough Guide Pacific Northwest book
much more useful.

This book has up to date, factual, interesting and on target information about the Oregon and Washington coast lines. The chapters each describe a community and its weather, events, attractions, lodging, restaurants, and more.

If you are thinking about exploring the coastal areas of the Pacific northwest, make sure you have this volume with you.

We quit relying on this book shortly after we found a couple of significant mistakes. The time we wasted attempting to make up for the incomplete or incorrect descriptions was not worth the leads provided by the guide. It's unclear if these problems were the product of editing errors, or, more seemingly, issues with the writers documenting areas they hadn't actually visited. Whichever, we realized that bad information is a lot worse than having no information at all.

Here are two examples of misinformation contained in this guide. On page 308, the K-R Drive-In is listed as "north of Roseburg." What this description doesn't point out is that it's actually 20+ miles North of Roseburg, which also makes it North of several other smaller cities (which could have been named to more exactly pinpoint the drive in's location). In fact, it's halfway between Roseburg and Eugene, which is how we finally found it from a local's directions.

This painful lack of precision could easily have been avoided by providing the exit numbers (rather than just the exit name) that accompany every exit on Interstate 5 in Oregon. The exit numbers are keyed to the mileage on the highway and let you quickly determine how far an exit is, in either direction, from your current location. For highways without numbered exits, mileage markers would work just as well. The omission of such directional information reduces the value of the travel guide significantly.

A second example of poor directions can be found on page 271. The guide states, "also in the same area, past the Toketee Lake Campground, you'll find the Umpqua Hot Springs down a short trail." This is inadequate and wrong on several counts. First, there's no description of the 2-mile drive off of Highway 138 that is necessary to get to the campground. Second, there's no notation of the additional 2-mile drive on a gravel road, once you pass the campground itself. Finally, and most unbelievably, the "short trail" is a reasonably strenuous, very steep, 1/4-mile hike along the edge of a hill. Handrails line the route for both support and to keep you from tumbling down the hillside.

Like many guides, this one is full of good leads, but as these two examples demonstrate, it occasions to follow through with incomplete or incorrect information. This can leave you on the road, attempting to piece together the details you need to actually find something. And given the hilly and mountanous terrain of Western Oregon, you can't count on any sort of cel phone connectivity to help you out.

With the other books and maps (including the AAA Oregon Tour Book) we brought along, and our nightly visits to various websites to piece together the next day's itinerary, we were able to circumvent some of the problems with Frommer's guide. In the end, however, we were unable to trust the directions in this book, making it significantly less useful than it should have been.

A well organized book which focuses on each distinct region within Oregon including the Willamette Valley which is now known as "The Bread & Wine" Basket of Oregon. Especially good is "The Best of Oregon" which provides the very best beaches, hikes, scenic drives, B&B's, and much more! It is totally updated and will serve as a great guide for our trip to Oregon this year.

Thirty-two pages? Unless you're desperate for this information--and I don't see why anyone would be; there's lots of FLW books--be aware that you're only getting about a dozen color pics and a brief accompanying story. Usonian houses are thoroughly covered in John Sergeant's book, in a more scholarly way. Nice presentation though: the cover is perforated like the plywood panels on the house.

This impressively illustrated small volume tells the inspiring story of an important Frank Lloyd Wright home. The Gordon House, 1957, was designed for an Oregon farmer and his wife. This very special house is one of only two houses to evolved from Wright's famous model house design "A Private Little Club", published in Life magazine, Sep. 1938. When new owners planned to destroy the house to make way for a much larger, but very common place design, national media attention, public opinion, and a sizeable tax deduction, pursuaded the new owners to allow the Chicago based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy to move the building to a new site. However, they allowed the Conserevancy only 105 days to remove the building from their property. The Oregon Garden, a relatively new botanical garden 25 miles south east of the original site, was selected to receive the building. Their team, through heroic effort and impressive community participation, moved and reconstructed the building in record time. It has now opened as the only Frank Lloyd Wright house museum in the northwest and the only "Usonian" design west of the Mississippy open to the public.

The book gives a good overview of the areas with many addresses. Anyhow I found it a bit too black and white. It gives useful maps, but no coloured pictures from the areas, which would make it a bit more pleasant to read.

I highly recommend this guide to anyone who will be traveling in the Northeast as well as Canada. This guide gives you everything from upcoming events for the year to where to stay & eat. The maps are easy to read and follow. I have been a reader of the Mobil Guide for many years and it is continuing to give the most accurate, up-to-date travel information. This is the MUST-HAVE for the Northeast traveler.

As a geology major with a focus on the Pacific Northwest, I couldn't help but come in contact with Thomas Condon in many of the books I was reading for courses. I then decided to learn more about him by reading his biography. I have to say I was stunned to learn the details of his life before he began missionary work! Who knew?! Still, this book does a decent job of documenting the highs and lows of Condon's life as it related to his work as an educator. I was, however, a bit disappointed with its lack of coverage regarding his involvement with women's suffrage - maybe, contrary to public belief, this wasn't one of his major focuses? Overall, it was an enjoyable (if sometimes patchy) read.

I must confess a slight bias - we all know Thomas Condon as one of our foremost geologists. I, however, was lucky enough to know him as my great grandfather. Well, not know him - he died well before I was born - but I knew of him. Intimately. And now the common reader has the same opportunity! On the whole the book captures my great grandfather perfectly - but there are a few omissions. If the anecdotes my parents' entertained their eleven children with are true, Thomas Condon spent more time with women than involved in women's suffrage; more time in prison than involved in prison reform. But, bygones - on the whole, a job very well done and I recommend this book heartily for those interested in the pacific northwest, geology, reform, and/or irish americans.

As a software designer and as somebody who lives and works in buildings in cities, I find the ideas in some of Alexander's other books on architecture and design - The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language - very interesting and appealing. They are a brave attempt to point to a more human, community-oriented way of doing things.

I had high hopes that The Oregon Experiment would describe a concrete example of whether these ideas worked when they were put into practice. It does nothing of the kind. It describes an interesting thought experiment in participatory design and tries to present this as a vindication of the Pattern Language concepts. But nowhere does it even mention whether the design it describes was ever actually implemented, much less whether it worked from the inhabitants' point of view.

It is very easy for a design team to get carried away with what a great design they have on paper. I've done it loads of times. That enthusiasm tells us nothing about whether a design is actually going to be a success.

I know Alexander later moved from academia and started trying to put his ideas into practice on actual building projects. A book on his real experiences and how well the original ideas stood up to the cold light of reality would be fascinating and important. The Oregon Experiment isn't that book.

The Oregon Experiment is one of a series of influential volumes on architecture and social design published by Christopher Alexander and his colleagues in the 1970s. While the most well-known volume in the series, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, and Construction, develops general principles for the design of social spaces at all scales, The Oregon Experiment applies those principles to a specific case: the campus of the University of Oregon.

If you are looking for an example of a specific campus plan, however, you will not find it here. Central to Alexander's approach is the notion that communities should not create fixed master plans, but rather should develop a common pattern language, and then apply it organically, in a piecemeal fashion, as needs arise. The book talks as much about this process of planning as it does about individual construction projects. Whenever a need arises (expansion of a building, addition of a door, creation of a green) people consult their pattern language and build something to suit the space and satisfy the need. Because everyone follows the agreed-upon language, the new parts harmonize with those that already exist (or replace earlier, poorly-designed structures).

If you have enjoyed studying Alexander's patterns in A Pattern Language, you will find here a collection of new ones that are specific to a university setting, including "University Population," "University Shape and Diameter," "Departments of 400," "Local Administration," "Classroom Distribution," and about a dozen more. Although he clearly draws on ideas from British universities in many cases, he unaccountably does not include one of the fundamental features of the British model, namely the residential college of 500 (or so) within the larger institution. (Although he does include aspects of this pattern under the heading "Small Student Unions.") As always, Alexander's pattern descriptions are clear, blunt, and thought-provoking.

The question that most readers will want to have answered is, "Does all this really work?" When the volume was written, of course, the process was just getting under way, and so we cannot know from this book alone whether everything described was successful or has been sustained over the long term. From what I've seen of campus master planning in public universities, it often turns out in the end to have less to do with creating good educational environments than it does with kowtowing to the local chamber of commerce and lining the pockets of already-rich trustees. But just because something is difficult doesn't mean it shouldn't be made the goal. If Alexander or someone at the University of Oregon were to produce a sequel, "The Oregon Experiment 25 Years On," I'm sure it would meet with a warm reception.

The book is called "A Camping Guide", so I was expecting a guide to camping, campgrounds, etc. Well, it's more like a suggested trip guide with very little (5 lines) information per campground. Also, they list only very few, only those which are on their suggested trips. Even though not a complete loss (the trips are kind of nice), I think the title is completely misleading. Also there are 5 trips for WA, 2 for Oregon, and 1 for BC... very Washington centric. I also don't quite understand why a camp guide needs information about downtown Seattle.... not many people camping there last time I checked. If I want a tourist guide for Seattle, I buy one and there are many better ones.

Now this is an RV guidebook. The book is separated into 1 tour per chapter(there are 8 tours in all) - and included in each chapter are suggestions for what to see and where to camp plus pictures of some of the campsites. They seemed to like the less commercial more nature oriented ones that I prefer. I especially liked the shopping mentions as all hiking and no shopping makes me a dull girl! While I won't follow the tours exclusively, they give me a heads up on places and sites not to miss and I look forward to putting this guidebook to use very soon.

The author of Strife in the Sanctuary, Phil Zuckerman, lived in Eugene, Oregon while working on his Ph.D. He studied the emerging divisions between two groups in what was formerly one Jewish community. Zukerman spent time with each group and gained the confidences of everyone in the community in order to write this book. My wife and I were the main antagonists in this book. We were given the names Lynn and Josh Roshefsky, but little else was disguised. After my wife and I read the book we experienced a profound sense of pain. We felt the vulnerability of having quiet disclosures revealed and we revisited all our motives, actions and words. We withdrew further from Eugene's Jewish community, wounded because we saw how our former friends made so little effort to understand or accept us, and how they talked behind our backs. Slowly, with the help of a few close friends who were intimately involved in the early stages of the expansion of Eugene's Jewish life, we began to understand this book. In order to write what he thought would be an interesting book, Zuckerman wanted a hero and a villain. Thus, the rabbi of the community became the hero and we became the villains. Unfortunately, as any good sociologist should be able to describe, life is not that simple. The author has written a partial account of a painful failure in community. He does a good job describing how each group of Jews in a small community(one group leftist, secular and political; the other group religious and spiritual, with a range of politics never described) are unable to communicate. Each group uses different words which mean different things to the opposing group, each group has different values and goals, and most important, each disdains the closely held values of the opposing group. These people, many of whom dabbled in leftist politics in the Sixties split over two fundamental issues of our time; gender and religion. This sounds like the basis for a good sociological study. Unfortunately, it barely gets off the ground. Zuckerman describes gender politics from the narrow perspective of traditional feminism, and he has a consescending attitude toward people who choose other points of view. (Ironically, he seems to have problems with strong Jewish women. The two stongest women in the book, my wife and the Rebbitzen, who are on opposing sides are both treated harshly by him.) Most regrettably, Zuckerman does not analyze basic sociological issues of group rivalry. How did these groups split apart; why did one group become hateful; why did the other group become withdrawn? What actions were taken by leaders in the community? What attracted people to traditional Jewish thought and what caused some to pull back? Zuckerman does not address these critical issues. He focuses on the controversy of getting rid of a long term, charismatic rabbi. Worse, he publishes the most nasty and hateful comments by people criticizing others in our small community. These comments are so extreme one doubts whether these people will be able to face each other again. What purpose does it serve to publish these comments, other than to write a more spicey book. There is a concerted, ongoing effort in modern Orthodox communities to educate about the most powerful destructive force within a community, lashon hora (literally, the evil tongue). This book is an example of lashon hora at its worst, and the author can't seem to get out of this sewer to address the critical issues. He could have written about leftist intolerance, liberal apathy and conservative rigidity. Too bad, it could have been an excellent study, instead it's just a shallow hurtful little book.

Strife in the Sanctuary is an interesting read, but doesn't fully explain what it sets out to explore: Why would a small religious community expel some of its members for getting too religious? This fascinating question is raised, but the author does not employ journalistic or scholarly methods or reasoning to find answers and relies a bit too much on gossip and his own opinions and beliefs to make his point. I enjoyed the book, I just wish the research was more thorough.

When I first picked up Zuckerman's "Strife in the Sanctuary", I was a little dubious, not having much of a background in either religion or sociology. I quickly found that the story Zuckerman is telling is truly interesting, and that his presentation and writing style make complex issues and academic theories relevant and interesting to those of us without a great deal of background in these issues. One of the book's main qualities is the author's ability to delve into the humanity of the people and conflicts he is describing, and the reader gets an excellent sense of the tensions and struggles of factional strife. I have just read Zuckerman's new edited compilation of W.E.B. DuBois's writings on religion, am again very impressed with his work, and look forward to reading more of his insight and analysis in the future.