Is there anything GOOD about ranching, except seeing baby grass erupt in the spring and hearing the birds? The ranchers I knew when I lived in SD (1987-90) didn't leave piles of afterbirth and dead calves lying around for weeks at a time, although they existed. I don't know where they were, but of all the time I spent on ranches, they were never apparent. And, none of the people I knew lived within 1/4 mile from a highway. Why would a rancher keep breeding a big Charolais bull to little Angus heifers if it's going to tear them apart to deliver, or deliver calves that have to be sawed in pieces to get them out? I grew up on a farm with cattle, but I must be missing something here.
I realize this was a diary, but it became very tedious reading what with doing basically the same thing day after day.

As I approached the end I thought, "If I have to read about feeding cattle or fixing fences one more time, I'm going to scream!" But these are major elements in ranching and, and this is a diary of one year in a rancher's life, so they must be included.

Hasselstrom keeps a candid diary of a year in her life as a woman rancher and spares nothing from castrating steers and the dead pile to doctor visits and a fur-trader rendezvous re-enactment vacation.

This is a family ranch owned by her father who lives just down the hill, but by now he sees his daughter as an equal partner. During the winter, her father heads to Arizona. She and her husband wonder if they will have enough feed for the winter, they struggle through snow to feed the cattle, they worry about the cattle not on the home farm, and are saddened to see the toll that a winter takes. In spring, calving dominates their lives which is complicated when a late April snowstorm catches them without cattle feed. During the spring they mend fences, sort cattle, and watch coyotes play with mice.

However, her life is not all ranching. She is constantly writing about her struggle to maintain her writing work which flares and sputters but never completely stops. She also gives writing workshops and campaigns for environmental causes. Hasselstrom is also very open about her past, a failed marriage, her step-children, her decision not to have children, and her relationship with her husband. She allows us to follow the ebb and flow of her marital relationship from the claustrophobia of back to back snowstorms and the fears of a looming surgery, to planting the garden together and the anxiety she experiences when she can't help her husband outside.

Although it contains many crises, this is not a compilation of the best and worst of a ranch life, but the honest daily activities of a ranch year involving cattle, humans, and nature. This will strike a chord of authenticity for anyone who has ever cared for cattle.

This book is about people living strenuous lives in an environment of extremes -- drought and prairie fires in summer and fierce cold and blizzards in the winter. And there seem to be no moderating seasons in between.

The author, a writer, poet and environmentalist, has returned in mid-life to the South Dakota ranch where she grew up. Here she lives with her husband, a Hodgkin's-survivor, helping her parents make a living by raising cattle. The year is 1987.

Forget the Cartwrights. This is a book about real ranch life -- the endless hard work, the human and financial cost, the losses and disappointments that become almost routine.

Only a stoic acceptance of forces far beyond one's control seems to keep these people facing one day after the next. There is also the redemptive power of work itself, whether fence mending, working cattle, or putting up food supplies for winter.

Add to this an appreciation for the beauty of one's surroundings. Hasselstrom often stops to record the stark pleasures of life observed on the plains -- carpets of wildflowers on the pasture slopes, migrations of birds, the appearance of deer and coyotes.

And there are the starker observations of weather. Each day's high and low temperatures are noted, and brief descriptions of cloud cover, the many varieties of snowfall, wind, rain, and the unrelenting sun and heat. There are sub-zero winter days with wind chills below -50, and one summer morning that dawns with a low of 90 degrees.

Although she denies feeling isolated (a highway passes by the ranch, and they are only miles from a small town), there is a sense of lives lived without much contact with other people. Horses, pets, and even wildlife provide the social environment. You understand the appreciation she articulates when her rural community gathers for the end-of-summer county fair.

And to know people is to know adversity and vulnerability -- there are frequent brushes with death. An uncle on a nearby ranch suffers a heart attack. The members of a family from another ranch are seriously injured in a car accident.

The author herself is trampled by her horse. Her husband undergoes tests for cancer and is hospitalized for surgery. Her husband's spirited teenage son, from a previous marriage, spends a few summer weeks with them and then is gone again, the house suddenly filled with an unwelcome quiet.

It is a compelling book that leaves you in wonder, with feelings welling up at the end that make you reluctant to part from these very real people whose daily lives you have come to know so intimately. Far from the farm I grew up on, I relived something of that demanding life as I read this book and was also helped to see it with new eyes.

I am an advanced biker, I found this book to be much more for begineers, and also, it does not give you very many tips, I have tried aalmost half the rides in this book and i found that only 25% of them were actually okay. If you are advanced, like me, i don't suggest you buy this book, if you are begineer-medium biker, i suggest you can get it.

This book has lots of interesting and easy-to-medium routes submitted by individual cyclists, including road and off-road trails. My wife and I have enjoyed the rides in this book much more than the ones in Grob's book, which are often too ambitious. We recently lost our copy on a tour, and ordered a replacement because we missed it so much! One pet peeve is that the distances are sometimes off by a few miles, making the directions a little hazy, but this only happened in a few of the rides we tried.

This book was interesting but it had several flaws. It was a basically a defense of the army's 27th Infantry Division during the Saipan invasion during the Pacific war. It was at Saipan where the 27th did not measure up to marine units.

The author claims to be objective but I find that difficult to believe. He is writing about his own Uncle, William O'Brien. He was also writing about the 27th Infantry Division, a national guard unit which consisted of men from his own home town and area. I detected a bias in defense of the 27th and a bias against Marine General "Howlin Mad" Smith who relieved 27th Division commander General Ralph Smith.

The author claims that this was the one and only battle where army troops fought under the command of the a marine general. This was untrue. Army units fought successfully under marine General Vandergrift at Guadalcanal in 1942, under marine General Geiger at Peleliu in 1944, and briefly under Geiger again at Okinawa in 1945. The author blames marine command for many of the 27th's problems but has a shaky arguement.

The author also defend the 27th divison as "one of the best trained units in the Pacific". I have read many other books and many other authors do NOT share this opinion of the 27th. Many other authors have a much lower opinion of the 27th. In fact, at Okinawa in 1945, an army general withdrew the 27th from the main battle and sent it to the rear for "garrison duty". Let's be realistic and honest. Not all members of the armed forces in WW II were "the elite". Units differed in quality. Some units were excellent and some were of lesser quality.

Note: I am NOT a marine but just someone who has read many books on this subject.

Mr. O'Brien gives a vivid detail of the 105ths movements from the landing on the beaches of Saipan to the final evacuation from the Gyokusai attach in Tanapag. He follows his uncle Lt. Col. William J. O'Brien from battle to battle all the time merging stories of the hundreds of other men who fought along side him. Giving an almost play by play of scirmishes from survivors stories. I couldn't put it down. I will never Hash through the jungles here the same way again! Infact, I went to the memorial and looked for his name of the thousands that are there and I found it. As you look at it you face to about the appoximate location of Tagapag village.

I have been a big fan of the "Best Places" series for years, and have enjoyed awesome trips in San Diego and the Pacific N.W. thanks to these guidebooks. But I was disappointed in the "Northern California" edition. I know, it's a guide to "best" places and as such will probably lean heavily toward the pricier establishments. And Northern California tends to be a pricey place. But while most of the other "Best Places" books include a wide range of places, from great ethnic hole-in-the-wall eateries to five-star dining experiences, this particular volume just piles on the five-star recommendations. You'll be hard pressed to find, for example, a basic breakfast hangout, a good sandwich joint, and ESPECIALLY a lodging [for a reasonable price]. If all I want to do is patronize the trendiest and priciest, what do I need a guidebook for? Anyone can find the chic places; a guidebook should help a visitor nose out the less-discovered treasures. Also, the oh-so-trendy, oh-so-chic, been-there-done-that-seen-it-all-eaten-it-all tone of the writing gets a little wearing after awhile. Buy some of the other Best Places guides, but look elsewhere if you want something more comprehensive for Northern California.

Top restaurants and lodgings throughout Northern California are rated and reviewed and range from lodgings and restaurants to tourist opportunities. Best Places Northern California features some of the truly best places in the state and provides a candid guide to all the amenities to be offered in its places. Highly recommended; if only one guidebook to the state were to be selected, Best Places Northern California should be the 'Bible' of choice.

This 1966 novel by Belfast-born Moore (best known for "Black Robe" and "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne" is a touching and affecting --- and very, very Irish --- story of an 18-year-old boy in World War II Belfast who is trying to figure out where he fits in. He isn't good at academics (unlike his father and brother), his girlfriend is a strict Catholic who won't let him get past first base, and he's only sure of what he doesn't believe.

He drops out of school and takes a low-paying job with the First Aid Patrol, a civil-defense outfit that few people take seriously, since it is widely believed that Hitler wouldn't bother bombing Ireland, and certainly not Belfast. Many older Irishmen hope that Hitler will defeat the British.

This novel rambles somewhat but does have a convincing and satisfying conclusion, and the writing has several passages of considerable brilliance. A fast - paced, easy read, with realistic characters in a well-described milieu.

Not surprising for those familiar with Moore's novels, he comes storming out of the gates with a lighthearted sort of tongue-in-cheek contempt for religion (specifically Roman Catholicism) right on the first page, where young Gavin Burke is having an imaginary dialogue with the icon of the Divine Infant that stands watch over him from its perch on his bedroom dresser. Gavin no longer believes in God, yet he remains in dread of God's vengeance for the fact of this unbelief. He struggles with what he calls his Black Angel and White Angel which live, one on each shoulder. "The trouble was, the Black Angel seemed more intelligent; more his sort." Comic dialogues with these invisible psychoanalysts abound in the novel.
The scene is Belfast Ireland, early stages of WWII. Seventeen year old Gavin enlists in the war effort to escape the responsibility of continuing his education and getting "a real job." This is a great spin on one of Moore's oft-recurring themes... a young man struggling to make a go of it, and making wrongheaded decisions as he does so!
Gavin joins the A.R.P. (the First Aid Party, similar to a wartime emergency Red Cross). The boy has a totally negative self-image, and convinces himself that he is just "a second son that will never amount to anything." He'll never be as successful as his older brother Owen, and will never meet his father's expectations of him.
So... he welcomes the War. As did many Ulster adults in that era, who oddly welcomed the advent of Hitler. They revelled in his havoc in Britain, and maintained the belief that the Fuhrer would never strike at their own little backwater towns anyway.
For Gavin, "War was freedom. Freedom from futures" (p.7). If there is a central idea in the book, this is it... it is a key theme in the novel. Believing those six words provided Gavin and many others with an excuse for not facing their personal problems. The ever-present, albeit unlikely, threat of attack provided distraction of all sorts.
The central drama is within Gavin's consciousness and in a bitter conflict between him and his father. Gavin's adolescent fantasies of power and achievement - sometimes sexual, sometimes iconoclastic - always rest on a knife-edge of indecision and powerlessness, of shame and humiliation. But these fantasies, and his father's equally self-serving political/philosophical beliefs are put to the test when the bombs fall.
It seems that Hitler has found Ireland on the map! This changes everything.
Father and son who have been bitter adversaries throughout the novel are reconciled through a shared knowledge of the horror of war. It proves to be more than either of them were ready for, and when they both return to their bombed-out house, they find that the war has changed a lot more than the physical landscape.

Those who know about Moore's own upbringing will see that there is much autobiographical content in this novel.

What a great book. My four stars is actually four-and-a-half!
A word about the title. It is borrowed from a Wallace Stevens poem. I looked it up in hopes of finding out why Moore chose this phrase as his title. The actual poem is very difficult, and far beyond the scope of this review to even half-examine. But what is certain is that it represents symbolically, the bitter moment of choosing life over death, at a time when life seems particularly lonely, self-serving, lustful, and sordid.
When I first picked up The Emperor of Ice-Cream I seriously thought it would be about a guy that sold ice-cream.
Moore proves once again that he is so much deeper than me...

Truth be told, I couldn't put the book down, but that doesn't translate into a well developed novel at all. Eickhoff took an interesting period of very modern history (ending of the "Troubles") in Ireland, added some older and tired IRA operatives, drugs/America/CIA connections, and created a book based on an old theme: "tired gunslinger wanting to retire, but they won't let him". True to form, there's plenty of action and that's what kept my attention. Eickhoff can write interestingly.

Unfortunately, there are too many characters and very little real character development. There are too many intertwined subplots - nothing that would surprise spy story readers, though. He got sidtracked in trying to develop a surprising ending and ended up with nothing new, nothing surprising, and less than meets the eye.

I would like to meet this novelist in a less complex, but better developed opus and see what he makes of that. I'm sure he would do well with it. Fallon's Wake is worth reading as escape and entertainment, but not when you want something you can remember the next day.

I would hesitate calling Mr Eickhoff a genius, but "Fallon's Wake" is a brilliant story, complexing, yet simple in its understanding of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. As a resident of Belfast, I can say that if Mr Eickhoff is not a resident of the country, then he has an uncanny gift for climbing inside of individuals and becoming them. Given the tenacity and ferocity of Fallon, I'm not certain that I would want to meet the author of "Fallon's Week" as an adversary on some dark night. This is one of the best novels I have ever read by anyone about the situation here in Northern Ireland, Irish, American, or English. If not an Irishman, he should be!

"Jottings' he says and he does not lie. The superficiality of this book was a great disappointment. Here's what I got from this book: childhood was nice. School was hard. Italy was pretty. Parish life was fine; but the Troubles were hard. There are a few moments when he's writing about the Troubles when he seems to connect with his heart--and a few where his sense of humor finds him. On the whole, though, this was utterly flat.

I thought this bok was very interesting and well written. Being from Co. TYrone myself,it was nice to see familiar towns and places in a book.Its bound to be difficul growing up in those difficult times especially being a Catholic Priest, Dr.Daly lived an interesting life an is very well respected.. Fair Play to him.You should defintley check it out. His recording of events on Bloody Sunday are interesting and truthful of the murder that happened on that day.Give him the credit he deserves.

Generally, I've been pleased with this series of books -- they are very useful and informative for a wine lover travelling in any region and we have used them often. However, this book on Northeast Italy does not include the Valpolicella winegrowing region near Verona -- which produces the best red wines in Northeast Italy! It includes other winegrowing areas in the Veneto, so how can they leave out Amarone and Valpolicella?

We actually used this guide as our main guide through northestern italy. We find some amazing retsuarnts and hotels, ones you wouldn't know from the o utside. Some restaurants you absolutely need to know Italian, it seemed like they never saw a tourist before. The maps in the book are not very good, and don't show most of the places mentioned. Have a very good other, an up-to-date map.

Just one word about the region: super wines, not many you will be able to purchase in the states.

Few polar historians or academics are aware of the late Robert J. Morrison's 1987 exposure of Stalin's North Pole scam of the 1930's, in "Russia's Shortcut to Fame: 50-Year Hoax Exposed." Morrison researched from previously classified US Army documents and photographic evidence that the so-called record setting flights originated from remote islands of the Alaskan panhandle to Vancouver, WA and San Jacinto, CA, not from Moscow as Stalin wanted the world to believe. Also Levanevsky was not lost in the Arctic, but was a victim of Stalin's great paranoid 1937 purge

Since I'm the author of this book, please disregard the five-star review, which I've assigned pro forma. This is meant to be a note about Ted Heckathorn's customer review of _Red Arctic_.

Mr. Heckathorn criticizes my book mainly on the grounds that I fail to take into account Robert Harrison's "proof" that the USSR's three transpolar flights of 1937 (along with other Soviet air expeditions) were faked. I would argue in return that to ignore Harrison's "findings" is not a fault, but rather responsible scholarship.

Readers should be aware that Harrison's book (a vanity publication that was, for some time, unable to find a press at all, then was taken up by a publisher that specializes mostly in thriller fiction) is a classic example of conspiracy-theory fringe literature. At least on the Internet, its principal endorsement comes from a British neo-fascist group (www.heretical.co.uk), most of whose web space is taken up with paranoid ravings about "Hebrew millionaires" and "Jewish communists." This is not to say that Harrison (or Heckathorn) shares any of these views; it is simply to show that Harrison's writings hardly occupy a place in the scholarly mainstream.

Harrison's arguments are based on speculative readings of grainy, poor-quality Soviet photos, equally grainy, poor-quality photos taken by the U.S. Army, and theories and assessments contained in U.S. intelligence reports. Harrison fails to take into account that the Soviet media (much like Western news services, then and today) routinely printed stock photos of pilots and aircraft, so images in newspapers and books did not always match the times and places mentioned in captions or headlines. This creates inconsistences, out of which Harrison spins theories more elaborate than they need to be. Moreover, the U.S. Army was hardly the most objective observer of Soviet aviation, and, for that matter, it was not always the most accurate. Also, writing in the 1980s, Harrison had no access to government and Communist Party documents in Russian archives, a plethora of which shows that these flights did in fact take place (and since these documents were never intended for public consumption, Soviet or foreign, it is safe to assume that they were not faked).

Finally, Harrison's conclusions, especially when applied to the third polar flight of 1937--Levanevsky's fatal disappearance--flies in the face of all logic. If the Stalinist regime went to such great lengths to deceive the world about its polar triumphs, in order to impress the international community with its technological prowess and human bravery, why on earth would it follow two stunning successes with a hideously embarrassing failure? If Stalin had wanted to purge Levanevsky (as Harrison and Heckathorn assert), he could have done so easily without a needlessly intricate plan that necessitated tarnishing the USSR's earlier exploits in the Arctic (faked _or_ genuine).

Admittedly, no archival record ever reflects the past with absolute precision or completeness. And Stalin was certainly ethically and practically capable of any deception imaginable. But Stalin did not deceive without rational purpose. And the archival record is more trustworthy than dubious guesswork based on possible inconsistencies spotted in photographs of less than stellar quality. At most, Harrison has raised the rather truistic point that not everything about Soviet propaganda exploits was as it seemed. But, with respect to matters of substance, he has neither proven nor disproven anything, circumstantially or conclusively.

As a resident of Cincinnati for almost twenty years, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book offered walking tours in places I had never been to much less heard of. In addition to the unexpected, this book's greatest strength is in the number of walking tours it offers (almost 60). It is also a great companion book to Cincinnati Observed since it offers walking tours of many suburbs and parks that Cincinnati Observed does not cover. However, for those looking for indepth analysis or history of sights you will be seeing on the walking tour, you may be disappointed since the walking tour descriptions are rather short. Also, many areas of the City of Cincinnati are ignored in favor of outlying suburbs. However, since Cincinnati Observed does such a great job with the walking tours inside the city of Cincinnati and Walking Cincinnati picks up areas not covered by Cincinnati Observed, if both books are used, you will be sure not to miss anything interesting in the City of Cincinnati.

I went on Hike# 49 (Boone County Cliffs State Nature Preserve) and if I hadn't been a local resident I would have NEVER found the place. The book's directions were to look for the turn off 6 miles east of Burlington; it should have said WEST of Burlington. Also, the sign at the small road you are supposed to look for that says "Kentucky Nature Conservancy 1.9 miles" actually is an "adopt-a-highway" sign that indicates that the KY Nature Conservancy has adopted the next 1.9 miles of road, meaning they are responsible for picking up trash along the road. I drove past this sign several times before I realized it was the sign I was supposed to be looking for. Ok, other than that, it was a great hike in a beautiful forest. I'm glad the authors wrote this book, they just need to update it with better directions.