There's nothing like a guide that gives you interesting info that other guides don't: helpful restaurant reviews and guides to ethnic (and non-ethnic) neighborhoods, parking info, funny comments about our favorite city and its mayor, and general how-to-survive-in-Providence tidbits. Especially good for prospective Brown students. The bible for Brown students regarding restaurants, transportation, and everything else. If you are going to Providence for anything (to live, to visit) buy this book. It;s fun just to read, too... a great way to procrastinate.

This guidebook provides great restaurant reviews and hordes of information about the city. It may lack information about surrounding New England but for the short or long trip to Providence, this book will serve all of your needs. For the person interested in Brown University, this is ideal, providing info about student activities. With Providence coming out of its shell and this the only guidebook I could find, I highly recommend it.

Muriel Spark is deliciously witty and writes with a lively charm. This does not prevent her from having an extraordinary talent for portraying the monstrously abnormal--to be precise, the diabolical. THE DRIVER'S SEAT, for instance, is overwhelmed by this malevolence--it is an excellent nightmare, but has only small moments of the Spark charm.

THE BACHELORS has a lot of both--the "medium" Patrick is one of Spark's most chilling portraits of evil. The scheming Spiritualists resemble more typical Spark "villains" (like the literary circle in LOITERING WITH INTENT), but are perhaps even more harmless in and of themselves. However, unwittingly they touch on something far grimmer--Spark demolishes the Spiritualists by showing that the only thing worse than their nonsense is when they stumble upon something genuine.

The "good" bachelors' interactions with this group provide an entertaining and equally true view of things, preventing the chill from permeating the book.

Forgetting that I read this book some years ago, I recently picked up the new edition. Expecting to page through innocently and put the book back on the shelf, I suddenly found myself drawn into this devilish and absorbing tale about spiritual mediums, forgery, betrayal and yes, bachelors. Spark turns her marvelous eye on that group of men who want girls for companionship, but not marriage. This is a sly and yet poignant look at a group of intelligent, but not very bright Londoners circa 1960. I recommend it without reservation.

Backroad Bicycling In Connecticut offers 32 rides suitable for cyclists of all abilities and ranging from a 4-mile trail through a coastal reserve to a two-day bike tour of 114 miles through scenic Connecticut. Organized into five regions (the Litchfield Hills; the North Country; the Quiet Corner; The Housatonic and Connecticut River Valleys; and the Shoreline - Greenwich to Stonington), Backroad Bicycling In Connecticut is an ideal, highly recommended planning guide suitable for beginners and with much of value for even experienced cyclists.

One of the best guide books out there. Thoughtful routes, great directions and tons of interesting information.

When I first got the book in 1999, I read it cover to cover immediately, and learned much about the various beach finds I have been curious about for many years. It answered many of my basic questions and I still use it as a reference. Interesting and valuable information.

Althought the cover looks simplistic, it belies an excellent book for those interested in coastal and estuarine life forms and habitats in the Northeast US. Much more scientific than I expected. A great reference book!

I found this book to be very helpful in planning my vacation in Acadia. I have 2 boys aged 5 and 13 and needed hikes that were doable for the youngest one. He turned out to be the best hiker of us all! This book gave me a good sense of what the trails would be like. We only did easy and moderate and one strenuous one (South Bubble Trail). You will need to buy a more detailed map (like from the AMC) but the trails are well marked. I liked the section on the authors' favorite hikes. We did most of our hikes from their recommends. Don't miss the Wonderland and Great Head trails if you go! Happy hiking.

This is an invaluable guidebook for hikers at Acadia National Park. Our family -- including children ages 12, 9 and 3 -- visited Acadia for four days this summer and used this book to select a variety of trails. The authors describe the grade, distance, degree of difficulty and sights of nearly 150 miles of trails. Following their advice, we went along the Wonderland Trail to an enormous tidal pool, and chose the most appropriate route for our group up 1,200-foot Penobscot Mountain; there are many trails to the top of the mountain, and the book helped us choose the right one for our skill and fitness level. The older two children and one parent also climbed the cliffs of the Beehive; it's rightly described as a strenuous trail, but if you're not afraid of heights, the view of the coast is spectacular and the taste of wild blueberries at the top makes it special. (This hike is listed as one of the authors' favorites.) We found the book extremely useful. The book would also be useful for more experienced hikers; the authors have been on all of the park's trails, in all kinds of conditions. And the book fits neatly in a backpack, for handy reference in case you need to check the maps while hiking. Highly recommended.

This is the second edition of the original guidebook and while I didn't read the original one, I can say that this book was very handy to have when my wife and I toured Vermont. T The Schellers are very entertaining people who obviously have a sense of humor and they also have a good sense of what is interesting to visit and what isnt'. They also must have done a lot of driving. We tried out two of the drives they suggested and were amazed at all the things there were to discover along the way, not to mention the physical beauty of Vermont. Even looking at a map I doubt we would have discovered these drives on our own. We tried out some of their "finds" which I'd say were places we never would have found on our own and they made our trip truly special. The book is an amazing collection of information that covers history, hours of operation, interesting little tidbits and so on. Definitely worth the money.

My wife and I recently toured vermont by car and we were very glad to have this book. It made the trip a unique and memorable experience. We were able to find lots of little places that we never would have discovered without it, and met people "off the path" that were genuinely glad to see us. I strongly recommend this book to anyone planning to drive through vermont, even if it's only a short trip. Great book and very funny in places, too!

If you have ever wandered around Maine, you will have noticed a unique form of farm architecture. But ask most people why 19th century Maine farmers made such a concerted effort to physically connect the structures on their farms and the answer is "they needed a way to get to the barn through the winter snow." Trust me, I have gone around and asked current dwellers of Maine farmsteads. Thomas Hubka carefully points out that if that were so, we'd see similar connected farm architecture in parts of the nation where winters were even more inclimate and snowier. Yet Maine farm architecture remains almost totally enigmatic. Hubka's diligent field work reveals that forces were at work in mid-19th century Maine that conspired against the rural farmer: industrial competition for hand-manufactured goods produced at home for cash suppliment, a labor drain to other more prosperous farming regions, and unyielding land. The brilliance of Hubka's work is that he evokes how, despite all this, Maine farmers strove to adapt by creating resilliant islands of industry with the structure of their homes that defiantly sheltered year-round dooryard work efforts from wind and snow, but also change abroad. This book is also a perfect source of pithy detail and illustration regarding 17th century cape-style house architecture which, it turns out, is still ubiquitous in New England. Highly recommended, a stiking work.

There's a type of farm layout that you see in New England that you don't see elsewhere in the US. This book is a study of that type of farm, its whys and wherefores, and how it fit into people's lives -- or better, how their lives fit into it.

This book is written very clearly, with numerous graceful diagrams of floor plans, layouts, and photos of representative farms. The author has a deep sympathy for the ordinary farmers and their taxing occupation, as can be seen in the choice of photos (farmhouse buried in snow, barn on fire, farm family sitting in a front yard still dominated by those granite cobbles you expect to be piled into fences). Diagrams tell the demographic story of why these farms were created, why they belong to northern New England; how they were achieved and how people spent their lives in them.

For me, the magic comes in because I fell in love with one of these farms, and its sunny Lincoln-era dooryard. It has a subtle rightness because of its orientation, its site on a knoll, and a certain flexibility of layout. But even if you don't have such a reference point, I think you will be impressed at the perceptiveness of the work, if you can muster any interest at all in the topic.

p.s. I checked on the Web to see if the author is still flourishing. His current project seems to be the wooden synogogues of tiny eastern european towns. Sounds neat...

Even though this is a postcard book, you won't want to part with the postcards, and keep it as a memento and a reminder at Block Island's incredible beauty, serenity, and uniqueness.

...So when it's January...and I'm sitting at O'Hare Airport...and it's snowing like crazy...and flights are iffy...I can at least PRETEND that it's a balmy August afternoon in "Bermuda-of-the-North." Malcom Greenaway's photos are stunning.

When I first began to read 'The Bonds of Womenhood' I found the concepts general and the progress slow. Despite this slow start, Nancy Cott's work soon pulls you in to her convincing arguments and compelling presentation. By the conclusion one can appreciate the structure of the argument as much as the message, history, and interpretation she conveys in the text. I recommend this book to those who wish to begin a modern and fair interpretation of Gender history and Women's issues. There are few scholarly books that are enjoyable to read and this one in particular is commendable.

Cott argues that the market revolution in early America brought about the creation of a seperate women's "sphere" of domesticity. She further contends that the placement of women in a seperate "private sphere." can be termed the "cult of domesticity" She concludes by making the claim that the cult of domesticity allowed women to forge bonds through churches and fellow homemakers which helped bring about the first femenist movements of the early nineteenth century. The work stands as the primer for the revisionists' view of new women's "anti-victimization" history.