This publication has been my "Hikers Bible" for many years now. As some of you already know, there is not much information out there on this subject. Craig Martin has created a concise, easy to read list of places to the footpaths of New Mexico. Complete with maps and photos. A book I keep in my car!

Well worth the money you'll pay for this book

This book, as the title states, lists 75 hikes that are in New Mexico. I found this book to be very useful in planning our family camping trips.

I particularly liked the fact that at the start of each hike was some information that can help me rule out or count in a hike with very little reading. For example, it will provide: distance, elevation, elevation gain, interesting points of the hike, maps that I might want to have, the difficulty, the best season to hike this trail. THe maps also are very useful.

My only comment would be that the pictures are black and white and many of them can be left out with very little loss since they don't add much to the text. (in otherwords, they are flowers, chipmunks etc.)

An excellent resource for someone who might be interested in hiking New Mexico.

This book has a good story and an interesting angle. I liked the involvement of the Indian characters, although the Indian aspects of the story were very superficial. It is a fun read, although lacking in any real depth. The characters are all very one-dimentional. Changes in attitude are sudden and un-supported by the story.

I found the writing style to be rather annoying. The verb tense switches repeatedly from past to present tense and back again. Sometimes in the same paragraph. It feels very sloppy.

In general, the book reads like a pre-teen chapter book, although the subject matter (government conspiracies and assasination plots) would preclude that particular audience. It's a shame, because this could have been a really terrific story.

Worldwide public awareness of UFO/ET phenomena and government suppression of facts behind them seems to never have been greater than now. I perceive the inspiration for Grady Lee Bryant to write this exciting, fast-paced, truth-conceived adventure to be almost visionary. He is to be commended, also, for assessing certain rumors or beliefs of the Mescalero Apache which were utilized credibly to relate their involvement in the Roswell, New Mexico 1940's ongoing UFO mystery....a feat in itself, since it seems many aspects of Native American cultures are closed to outsiders and are somewhat allusive. I enjoyed reading this most entertaining book.

An exciting fiction story in Southeastern New Mexico that follows the alien incident in Roswell, New Mexico.

Though the backdrop of Taos supplies much that is rich and rewarding, getting through this book is more like wading through slush. It needs tighter editing and stronger writing. We don't find out much about characters from their behavior; the author supplies all that stuff. We get lots of details about meals and wearing apparel, but it has nothing to do with the nominal plot. One can be optimistic and look forward to increasing strength in the writing with future books.

This is the second highly readable book in Mari Ulmer's murder mystery series set in Taos, NM. The book is rich in atmosphere and abounds with colorful characters from Taos's unique blend of Spanish, Native American, and Anglo cultures. Featured are: a reluctant sleuth who would rather be writing fiction than solving mysteries; a pair of foppish art dealers who are mysteriously poisoned; a suspicious entrepreneur; a corrupt archivist; and many more characters. The plot has a surprise twist that will astonish even the most jaded readers.

If you like Tony Hillerman's books; you will love these. Mari Ulmer has created an unique series of mysteries set during the feast and festival days of Taos, New Mexico. Her heroine and hero and engaging and fun. The book leaves you feeling like you just spent two wonderful weeks in Taos actually taking part in the festival; standing in the plaza in the hot sun, eating fried onions and peppers, following the parade into the quiet, dusky confines of the church.

Along the way, you dine with the residents, visit all the historic places and stay in the local bed and breakfast, a wonderful old haceinda. This is a terrific new author and I can't wait for the next book.

I think other people should read it because it's nice how her father gives her something valuable to her. Also because it's kind of fun how they repair the church. I think Josefina took good care of the goat, Sombrita. [Karla Cortez]

Josefina is glad that her birthday is coming up. 9 going on to 10 was a great age to be! She could go on top of the church to replaster the church and help Tia Magandla, the healer, also her god-mother! She saved a life and got a kid named Somberetia, little shadow. To find out more, read this book!

This is another one of the American Girls series about Josefina Montoya, a nine-year-old girl (almost ten!) living in the New Mexico of 1824. In this book, Josefina finds joy in the work around her father's rancho, particularly nursing a newborn baby goat that has lost its mother. When she spends the day with her aunt Magdalena, the town's healer, she begins to think that she would also like to become a healer. But, there are big responsibilities that come with such a career. Tia Magdalena says that if she is to become a healer she will know...and Josefina may be about to find out!

The final chapter of this wonderful book is a highly informative look at growing up in New Mexico in 1824. And, as always, Jean-Paul Tibbles' beautiful illustrations make a wonderful addition to the text.

This book certainly goes a long way towards maintaining the tradition of excellence that one associates with the American Girls books. My daughter loves the stories, while I like the lessons that the author gently weaves throughout the book. My daughter and I both highly recommend this book to you.

I like this character in the first book and am glad she wrote the sequel about her. The history of the Harvey Houses is incredible! This is a well written story with romance and intrigue, just the way I like it!

I finished this book in only a few hours because it was so good. Ms. Peterson is able to draw you into her characters' lives from the beginning. In this book, Rachel (from a "Shelter of Hope") is faced with the trial of working with the man she was engaged to six years ago. With the added frustration of missing inventory, a scheming girl, and an overbearing landlady, Rachel has her hands full. However, by learning to trust again and not giving in when things look their worst, Rachel is able to move forward with her life.

Simone & Jeffrey O'Donnell, the main characters in "Shelter of Hope" play only minor roles in this novel, but the reader is given a look into their life--allowing for the first story to come to its full conclusion.

Hidden in a Whisper is a great book. I read the entire thing in one day. Never a dull moment. Along with the main plot, there is a mystery too, which makes it even more enjoyable!

A fun vacation read. Anecdotes from a real wild west lawman -- who didn't do a lot of shooting and killing but somehow managed to be in the action none the less. It reminded me a little of the excellent Dustin Hofmann film, Little Big Man.

given the title, i was prepared to be unfavorably amused by this book but wound up thoroughly charmed by the direct and often witty descriptions and characterizations by this bona fide turn of that century wild west lawman, who, one must assume, was just as tough and unyielding as the 'hard cases' for whom this work is titled.

harkey's plain style and simple accounting of the events develops a remarkable bond of trust with the reader, and i came away almost with a casual sense of familiarity with some of the most savage and desperate bad men produced by that savage and desperate era.

recommend it very highly for anyone who would like to get a highly entertaining -- but pretty much unvarnished -- picture of life on the edge at that time.

More than fifty years ago I read Dee Harkey's account of his experiences as an old time western lawman, and "Mean as Hell" still sticks in my memory as the best account of what it was like to wear a badge in the old days. I give this book five stars not as a literary composition but as a highly intertaining account of how things really were in the heyday of the wild west. It is fast and easy reading, written in colorful language as it was spoken. As you read Harkey's writing you are soon magically transported into another era that will never return. You find yourself not just reading about his exploits, but living his experiences with him. I feel as though his unique unsophisticated writing style has expanded my own life experiences to include an important part of history that occurred long before I was born. Not many writers can do this.If you want to actually experience the old west, read this book.

DuBuys' and Harris' friendship with Jacobo Romero was an education for their minds and spirits and they share what they learned in this elegant volume. New Mexicans are hard to write about, because they use language more directly, to a different purpose, than most other Americans. It's difficult to tell a New Mexican's story, because it's hard to use a New Mexican's language. DuBuys has stood in a neutral place to see himself, his friend Alex Harris, their women, and his friend Jacobo Romero, his wife, and others, and to tell a story that is from the heart without being romanticized, that shares what he learned with striking generosity. The pictures are beautiful--the landscape of New Mexican people is even more stirring than the landscape of New Mexican land.

A captivating read, a joy, a lovely picture book. You will fall in love with this book... You will not be able to help yourself.

This is a fluid and absorbing book. Each chapter/vignette builds carefully upon the preceding one. The author's knowledge of the Southwest and its intertwined cultures and his affection for the land and his friends makes this a powerful read. Anyone interested in the Southwest, biography and/or photography should read this. It's wonderful!

Anyone who enjoys whole foods cookery, herbal healing, and organic gardening will appreciate Crawford's observations. Those with a philosophical bent will appreciate them even more. His reflections on a life lived close to nature are a bit like those of Thoreau or Jefferson, but Crawford appears to also be very much the guy who brings fresh produce to your local farmer's market.

Few of us have probably given much thought to the growing of garlic bulbs, which really consist of "cloves" that can be divided and planted or used to season everything from marinara sauce to stir fries. You might have noticed the green sprouts that begin to emerge from cloves of garlic kept too long in your refrigerator, but Crawford suggests garlic plants are difficult to grow because their life course is different from that of many other plants. Garlics have adapted to life in stressful places where rainfall is not always forthcoming but when they need moisture, they need moisture. To avoid death, the bulbs spend a good part of the year "resting" or dormant. In a chapter called "Waiting" Crawford says that's exactly what the garlic farmer does. Much of the year, garlic like other bulbed plants are in hiding, and the farmer must be patient and wait until they are ready for the harvest.

But Crawford's interaction with plants isn't only about garlic. He relates how he "tasted the landscape" as a child in his native California-peeling and chewing the white pulp of anise growing by the side of the road in winter; sucked the syrup of nasturtiums, smelled the pepper tree berries, and searched the orchids for loquats, limes, and mandarin oranges. Today, children are not so fortunate. Pollution, chemicals, other noxious matter have made much of the landscape dangerous. Crawford toyed with both conventional and organic farming. He says he wishes to ask those who enquire whether his products for sell at the weekly market are "organic" if they lead organic lives. Do they earn their money in organic ways. He says, "Perhaps in the poisonous desert of the city there is little else you can do besides seek out what you hope is "pure" food. In addition to being informative and philosophical, Crawford's book is provocative.

When Henry David Thoreau left the comforts of civilization to build his own house with his own hands and deliberately live close to nature, his experience at Walden Pond became a classic in American literature. Even today, many of us trapped in the mundane horrors of urban life long to escape, as he did, to a small plot of land somewhere outside the realms of commerce, overcommercialization, and petty-minded consumerism.

Novelist Stanley Crawford had the courage to do more than dream about it. He left California for the rigorous, simple life of a New Mexico garlic farmer and, like Thoreau, has written a wise and thought-provoking book about his experiences. His account spans a year in the life of garlic, tying topics as diverse as the nuclear bomb and the challenge of maintaining community to the rhythms of building one's own house from adobe and learning to plant and harvest responsibly.

After closing the cover of this book, I was ready to drive to New Mexico and seek out Crawford in the Farmer's Market, to buy my own bulbs of top-setting garlic and somehow bring some of the beauty of his life into my own. I may never stand in Santa Fe behind his pickup, buying a woven garland of organic garlic to hang in my kitchen, or perhaps I will travel there and stammer some foolish words about his writing as I hand him a handful of crumbled dollar bills. In some sense, the physical journey has become irrelevant: Crawford's New Mexico has already illumined my heart and wakened me to the rhythms of my own life. I don't have the strength or the patience to tend a field or a garden, manufacture adobe or create a home, brick by brick. But I, too, have a place in the world, and eyes to see--A Garlic Testament is one of those books that wakes us from habitual slumber and reminds us, as Thoreau so aptly put it, to advance confidently in the directions of our dreams, and to put the foundations under our castles in the air.

This is one of the best-written books that I have ever read. Each word is well-chosen, effective, and yet easy to read. At one point in the book, he alludes that he has written poetry previously. Each of the 39 chapters is a few pages long, presenting a brief essay on something related to garlic farming in New Mexico. There's an obvious love and care that he gives to his work (both garlic farming and writing), and he's able to show respect for others who have not chosen this path. The book also presents some information about how garlic is grown, but it's by no means a gardening book. It's a descriptive story of the cycles of the growing season. Like in his other excellent book, Mayordomo, the author also shares his community with us - talking about how farming, farmers markets, irrigation, and such intertwine a community, even one that contains members who originally went there to "get away from it all."

It's an old saw that writers should write about what they know. There are so many inaccuracies in this book, particularly regarding Native American culture and history, perhaps Eidison should turn his considerable talents to other subject matter. For example, he writes about Zuni Hogans. The Zuni, a Puebloan people, have never used hogans, which are a structure unique to the Dineh, or Navajo, people in the Southwest. In 1885, when the Army had standing orders to shoot any Apache, man woman or child, off the reservation on sight, it is unconceivable that a group of Apache warriors would encumber themselves with a group of captive white women on a journey of several hundred miles through territory full of U.S. Army forts and hostile Hispanic settlements. This book adds to a plethora of damaging misinformation about Native Peoples. Is it any wonder that the suicide rate among Indian teenage males is 300% greater than the rest of this nation?

This is an excellent book. I recommend it to anyone who likes books ealing with Indians or family. It is heart wrenching to think that a father could abandon his family, but if not this story would not have been as good. I do think Maggie could have had different personality. I mean what woman in her right mind lets her 11 year old daughter ride out into the dessert in search of renagade Apaches. Other wise I recommend this book to young and old alike.

I was moved to laughter and tears by this heartwarming and heartwrenching story of a dying old man who pushes himself to the limit to be reunited with his daughter and save his granddaughter from her Apache kidnappers. I was captivated right from the first page to the last, caring deeply about the characters and their predicament.

A Matty Madrid Mystery where the Sante Fe PI enters the Texas State Prison at the pleading of her inmate ex-husband.

A prickly thriller with attitude, full of eccentrically ordinary people touched in many ways by the penitentiary at the center of all their lives.

Nothing earth-shaking - just a solid mystery, set in an unusual location with tough folks in tougher situations doing the worst & the best they can.

As the author of a mystery series featuring a male Latino in a leading role, my path often crosses with PJ Grady's as we make our way around the mystery community's conventions. We frequently serve as members of the same author panels, and I am always proud to be part of the same panel as Ms. Grady. MAXIMUM INSECURITY is a terrific debut novel, and Matty Madrid is an amazing creation. Matty is true to life. Ms. Grady has a thorough understanding of the Hispanic culture of northern New Mexico. Matty accurately reflects her time and place. In MAXIMUM INSECURITY, Matty is hired to investigate the murder of a prison inmate. That murder proves to be merely the tip of an enormous iceberg of corruption. During the course of Matty's investigation, the reader learns much about this young woman PI and the world in which she operates. MAXIMUM INSECURITY was most deserving of its Shamus Award nomination.

Miss grady is a close friend of mine, and i think that as a teacher of mine and as a friend, she is a really good author. The book is very suspense full, and very well writen in general. I was suprised at the way the plot turned out, and I thought that she deserves a Shamus Award.

Brian