In my opinion (and possibly in fact), this is the only field guide worth using. Ms. Komarek pays explicit attention to detail, and has created wonderful keys to quickly and reliably identify whatever plant you may be viewing.

The book also lists many plants found in the lower elevations surrounding the San Juans, such as Durango, Bayfield, Pagosa, Mancos, and Cortez. If you are serious about plants in this area, or if you would simply like to identify them, this is the book that you need.

I take this book everywhere I go when exploring in the San Juan Mountains of Southwestern Colorado. It is well organized and comprehensive, with excellent illustrations.

The Conde de Jaruco, as the author is known, was an avid compiler of the histories of Cuban families. Though this volume, as well as the other nine of this series, concentrates on the elite and upper-class families, it is an invaluable resource for the historian and genealogist. For each family mentioned, the author provides a short history about their origins. He then provides a genealogy of the family in Cuba. For each generation he gives the names of the parents, their children, and sometimes the spouses and their children. At various times several generations of each branch are given. Though many times the dates on which various events occurred are not included, by careful reading they may be deduced. Anyone working on their Cuban genealogy or the history of important Cuban families would do well to have the entire ten volume collection of Historia de Familias Cubanas in their personal libraries.

I was surprised to learn that I am a direct descendant of Queen Joan the Mad of Castile! Duy the darn book already, smelly!

Lewis was able to go inside a family that trusted him enough to show just how difficult life can be. This book makes you think and shows you just how grinding poverty can eat away at ones soul. It also manages to show the vibrancy this family has. you are able to see the world from different members attempts at making a better life. It tells vividly how the streets of New York which hold so much promise ultimately cause most members of this family so much pain. This is a must read not only for latinos but for everyone. This book is more about the endurance of a soul as it is about ethnicity.

La Vida is an anthropological study that tells the story, in their own words, of an extended Puerto Rican family in San Juan and in New York. What a lively and colorful culture! If you want to get a sense of life among Puerto Ricans in the 1960s who exist low on the economic scale, this book will tell you everything you could possibly want to know about their individual lives from their perspective. The perspective is important because it can change the way the reader views a person until she hears that character's own voice. Every day I looked forward to "living" with this family.

I've just finished this book for the 3rd time. Each time I smile and dream about Colorado. I can smell the summer showers on the horizon. Now I know how to survive if I get caught again in one of those instant season changes from summer to winter. You know the type, that happen at about 10,000 feet, with a 50 degree temperature plummet in about 45 minutes, that leave you praying for a fleece and a quick decent.
Want to know about historical archaeological digs? Grizzly Bear Myths? Best place to find a burrito as big as your head? Pumas? Surely toxic ceramic-like mud? No???? You just want to know about trail riding? Well this is the book for that as well. Single and double tracks, wash boards, roads, the whole enchilada......mmmmm green chili. Who woulda thunk a trail guide would be so entertaining and yet so thorough? Buy this book now for any of the above reasons, or just buy it for the pure enjoyable read that it is.

This book has a personality lacking in most guidebooks. It is like having a local along on the ride with you. It is nice to see a mountain bike book by a Coloradan dedicated to Colorado mountain biking.

A fascinating photo essay on the Old City of San Juan, Puerto Rico, this coffee-table view book makes a wonderful addition to anyone's library. The authors and photographers did a wonderful job capturing the essence of the Old City's Spanish-influenced architecture, which were all inspired by the Santa Cruz District of Seville, Spain (Seville was the capital of trade between Spain and her colonies due to it's location). The cobblestone streets, religious buildings, and fascinating faces that bring this treasure to life are all here. Truly it gave me memories of my beloved homeland and a longing in my heart to return soon.

Whether you buy it for yourself or as a gift, the book's great price and format (it's a paperback) are great reasons to purchase it. Once you buy it , I'm sure you will be longing plan a trip to the island and walk through time.

This is a great book with excellent color photography!!! Nice variety of photos, focusing on architecture, people and natural scenery. Good historical background given.

Hi, this is Mark Drenth, author and photographer of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The general idea behind this book was to condense a "coffee table" book to a smaller format, thus providing a more affordable book with all the quality of a larger one. Youll find this book to be the one you pull out of your library to show friends what San Juan looks like, and it will end up on the coffee table. I covered all the major areas of San Juan, as well as some intersting areas that only a few tourists get to see. I kept the text to a minimum in order to focus more on the photos of San Juan. Im sure your going to love this book.

I saw this book in the airport of San Juan Puerto Rico in a couple of the stores. I loved it and bought four for gifts. I should have bought five because so many friends have looked through my copy, its beginning to get worn out.

I was browsing the books here and saw it, nobody has yet reviewed it so I feel compelled to give the first review.

The over all quality of the photos of the book are plain beautiful. Im from Puerto Rico, and didnt want a book with "old" looking photos, or photos of places that had changed. Its obvious all the photos are up to date, as of a couple months ago. Overall the book starts in Old San Juan and zig-zags through the city and ends up in Piniones. The only text of the book is a general opening on the first couple pages then just photos with captions of what they are. The captions are in four languages...english, spanish, german, french.

There are aerials of the city too...as Im looking at the book now there are also bookmark flaps on each cover...pages are high gloss...good feel.

This is one of those books that is a "must have" for anyone who travels... I just wish this book format was available for all the cities Ive been to. FIVE STARS.

Betty Pratt Johnston is a fantastic writer and gives you that edge on new dive sites. Her comprehensive style allows experienced and new divers alike to learn something new about every dive site listed. Betty covers items important to all levels of divers, including specialty divers like naturalists, UW Photographers, wreck etc...

A must have.

Presently, the Philippines has the distinction of being one of the most impoverished countries in the region with Filipinos ranking among the most malnourished in the world (even though it is a leading producer of food and other important exports). To compensate for a sagging economy and unrelenting immiseration, over eight million (ten percent of the population) Filipinos find themselves scattered throughout the world as "overseas contract workers" (OCWs) employed in low-paying, labor intensive jobs. Although 1946 marks the "official" end of U.S. colonization, U.S. hegemonic rule continues to be the most salient feature of contemporary Philippine life. Of course, not everyone sees it this way. A substantial amount of scholarship exists, devoted to understanding the alleged "special relations" between the Philippines and the United States. However, the bulk of this work (produced primarily by U.S. academics), has ignored the role U.S. intervention has played in the development and evolution of Philippine society. Instead, these apologists for U.S. empire, blame the failures and problems currently plaguing the country on Filipino 'culture' and their inability to fully absorb the lessons of their colonial master. After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontations by E. San Juan Jr. is a radical departure from the aforementioned apologists texts. In one of the most thorough, hard-hitting, perspicacious analyses on the subject, San Juan dismantles the myths surrounding U.S.-Philippine relations and lays bare the harsh realities U.S. imperialism has wrought on its former "showcase of democracy".

What differentiates After Postcolonialism from other commentaries is San Juan's emphasis on understanding Philippine history from a nationalist perspective. After being colonized for 400 years by Spain and another 50 years by the United States, Filipino society is best understood as a "historical-political construction. It is a product of mercantile capitalism that happened to be inserted into the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century and later into the domain of imperialism, a phase of finance or monopoly capitalism" (2). Thus, while Filipinos share some similarities with other Asians they are distinguished by the fact that their "country of origin was the object of violent colonization and unmitigated subjugation by U.S. monopoly capital" (13).

The centerpiece of this work is Chapter 3 "Spectres of United States Imperialism". Here San Juan delivers one of the most thorough critiques of U.S. ideology and its attendant knowledge production industry. As I alluded to earlier, there has been an immense amount of scholarship produced on the subject of U.S. intervention in the Philippines. Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (1989) is one of the most celebrated and popular among the revisionist texts. Like others before him, Karnow argues that Filipinos "'submitted voluntarily to their own exploitation'" (72). In an attempt to account for the underdevelopment and corruption plaguing the Philippines, Karnow resorts to blaming the cultural values and "tribal texture" of Filipino life. Rejecting Karnow's flimsy thesis, San Juan exposes In Our Image for what it really is: a mainstream apologist text. Taking his critique one step further, San Juan indicts Karnow for being a "shrewd popularizer, a bricoleur of hackneyed notions and received doxa culled from the researches of mainstream scholars such as David Joel Steinberg, Peter Stanley, Theodore Friend, Glenn May, and other 'gatekeepers' who guard the parameters of acceptable, safe thinking on the problematic of U.S.-Philippine encounters" (73). To be fair, San Juan explains that Karnow's analysis (one that purports to "objectively" describe the "Filipino") has its roots in a firmly entrenched tradition of U.S. colonial discourse dating back to 1914 with the publication of Dean C. Worcester's The Philippines Past and Present. For San Juan, this body of knowledge has been severely compromised by the "reality of seemingly ineradicable social injustice, unmitigated poverty of millions, rampant atrocities by the military, exploitation of women and children, and widespread violation of human rights by business and government" (73). Again, the importance of 1898 cannot be stressed enough when assessing the current realities faced by Filipinos.

Although I have discussed at length the subjugation of the Philippines by the United States, it would be irresponsible for me to ignore the resistance and revolutionary movements that colonialism has generated. Such movements constitute the durable tradition of anti-imperialism embedded in the popular culture of everyday life. San Juan devotes a chapter to examining the possibilities of revolutionary transformation in the country by focusing on the prospects and problems of the New People's Army (NPA). As the only Communist-led resilient insurgency in the world, the NPA has certainly suffered a number of setbacks throughout its history. These inadequacies have led to wide divisions on the Left, leading some to openly denounce Marxism-Leninism. According to San Juan, the critique of Marxism being issued from a few renegade Filipino "leftists" could be largely attributed to their current fascination with postmodernist thought. He writes that "Foucauldian deconstruction substitutes for historical specification and totalizing hypothesis, individualist cultural politics for mass political struggle (169). While I will not dwell on the vacuity of postmodernist thought and its constant critique of Marxism, I agree with San Juan when he convincingly argues that postmodernism is a "pretext for celebrating the virtues of market liberalism and such formal freedoms that have inflicted so much violence, torture, protracted misery, and painful death to millions of Filipinos and other people of color" (170).

Embracing Marxism does not translate into a crude economic reductionism (as so many suggest), but allows us to confront the massive social injustices brought about by the rule of capital. In our present era of global economic restructuring, a historical-materialist method of inquiry is absolutely necessary if we are to understand the profound iniquitous relations between countries in the North and those in the South. What we are witnessing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, under the guise of "globalization," is literally a phase of capitalist accumulation gone berserk. Everyday, millions of the world's poor are sacrificed by transnational corporations, their instruments for regulating trade (NAFTA, APEC, WTO, MAI), and international money lending institutions (International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). Despite this, numerous scholars have chosen to substitute a politics of revolution and transformation for a discursive analysis of free floating signifiers. Their obsession with the "post-this and that" obscures central relations of power necessary to understanding our current globalized order. After Postcolonialism reminds us that there is nothing "post" about colonialism. Countries like the Philippines have been transformed into neocolonial appendages supplying the First World with the bulk of cheap labor. Confronting this stark reality head-on and understanding that what the United States did to the Philippines in 1898 - what many consider the first Vietnam - has a lasting legacy that continues to shape and inform the lives of Filipinos as well as other people of color. The strength of After Postcolonialism lies in San Juan's passion and commitment to ending the neocolonial subjugation of Filipino people as well as others suffering under the dictates of U.S. hegemonic rule.

Anne E. Lacsamana, Ph.D., Troy, NY

This is actually more like a pamphlet than a book. It gives very detailed directions for driving the loop and tells you what you are looking at as you are driving by. Information includes the name of mines (with a little history) or old buildings along the road as well as the mountain peaks off in the distance. We left ours at home on our last trip and bought another one in Colorado.

I spent four years on the Western Slope of Colorado involved in one way or another with some of the wonderful literary talent in the area. If there is one thing I learned it was that when Western Reflection Publishing Company of Ouray, Colorado published a book it was usually worth looking at. This one is no exception. In fact, the reader of this book gets not only a well-edited book but one written by a highly talented Western slope author: kind of a two for one deal. Glen Hinshaw spent thirty-four years as a Colorado wildlife officer specializing in the San Juan Mountains and southwestern Colorado. For most of this time he was "on the ground" working out of Creede, CO. to preserve and protect the wildlife heritage that most people associate with Colorado and too many take for granted. Crusaders for Wildlife is a highly readable history of the near demise of many of Colorado's wild animals just a hundred years ago and the mostly unknown efforts of a band of dedicated crusaders that toiled to preserve and return the wildlife heritage for generations to come. This is not your usual history book. It is better. To be sure, there is an abundance of well-researched, well-written histories of the fish and game that make the San Juan Mountains truly a national treasure. You will learn of the stewardship of the land and wildlife by the Ute Indians and exploitation by early settlers. You will learn some of the complex issues that confront wildlife officers as they struggle to balance the needs of wildlife with the changing demands and expectations of a growing populace. The effects of logging, grazing, and roads on wildlife is examined in a balanced manner and the age-old question of the possibility of Grizzlies in the San Juan's is addressed. You will also learn about Whirling disease which is threatening Colorado's legendary fishing reputation and the reasons behind setting limits on Elk and Deer kills. Yes, its all here. If you are a hunter, fisher or simply have had the opportunity to visit the incomparable San Juan Mountains and want to know about the history of the game and fish in the area, this is the book for you. Hinshaw has a knack of writing in such a manner that you feel you are riding along side of him as he patrols the mountains he so obviously loves. It's like sitting at home with an old friend visiting about wildlife and mountains and other memories that matter. We are indebted to Hinshaw for a superb, readable history of an area truly blessed to have attracted the attention of these Crusaders for Wildlife. This one is worth the reader's time.