The book was interesting for somebody wanting to learn and become familiar with canyoneering and dessert hiking. However, in terms of providing practical data on good hikes, it is far behind any of Steve Allen's books. If you're new to this, then buy this and Steve's. If you've been there and done this, no need to reread the basics.

As a two year resident of Arizona, I have embraced the wonder of the Grand Canyon and it's tributaries. This book ties together its legend, geology, hydrology and the spritiual. It erodes the sandstone and runs with ancients. Mr.Annerino has obviously been there, lived it as few have and was profoundly influenced by. Way to go.

The canyons of North America are among the most spectacular in the world, providing unlimited opportunities for hikers, photographers, climbers, and other modern day adventurers. John Annerino offers a thorough guide to the fundamentals of safe and well prepared canyon exploration. The natural history and earth science of canyon country, as well as expedition conditioning, preperation, and equipment are discussed in detail, as are potential hazards and how to avoid them. -The Adventurous Traveler

This is a great travel book, providing quick and easy to reference to the lay-of-the land in the four-corners region in the style of a virtual tour of the area. The author takes you along his journey, showing you what to see and do, how to get there, where to eat, sleep, shop--or simply soak up the sublime beauty.

This book give to the reader and future traveller an unique vision of the history of this country. the writer help us to understand the people that inhabited this country and the geological features of this land of enchantment. For an european like me is the first and essential step to the visit of a country.

My wife and I plannned a trip to the Four Corners area and at the last moment received Journey to the High Southwest as a gift. We read it during the plane ride and made immediate adjustments to our travel schedule. The results were so good that we continued, chapter by chapter, to use Mr. Casey's guidance and suggestions. For those uninitiated in the region, or even experienced Four Corners visitors, we strongly suggest this guide. It will provide very accurate and useful information to anyone who uses it. Read the entire book - before you go!

South Texas women have always had a flair for entertaining. Nothing is ever ordinary! The book is filled with fresh ideas in a creative ensemble of South Texas cuisine. Recipes are easy to follow and offer a twist to the overly detailed companions. Your friends will delight in your cooking and be so ever inquisitive of the recipes, this I know from experience!

This is a great cookbook! There are great recipes for casual entertaining with ingredients that are easy to find. I collect JL cookbooks from all over the US and this is one of my favorites. Maybe because there are lots of Tex-Mex and appetizers.

This Cookbook has a lot of unique recepies that are very easy and and delicious. The variety also makes it easy to do a complete meal from the cook book.

OK, I'll admit it...
I am a Bobby Flay fan. But Bobby Flay Cooks American
is truly Bobby Flay at his best!
The recipes are easy to prepare, with basic ingredients,
with not a lot of frill. Easy to understand, and will
bring you many compliments!

I don't like Bobby Flay, but I have to say the guy knows how to cook! This is a great book, and I enjoy cooking out of it.

I have read all of Bobby Flay's cookbooks and made several of the recipes. This is my favorite cookbook. It is so much fun to read and the recipes are so incredibly varied. The recipes are presented well: clearer and more organized than his previous volumes. Julia Moskin, co-author, may be the new ingredient that makes this cookbook so special

The field guide was very handy in learning the specific animals and plants I encountered in Arizona.

It is handy to go back and look up an plant or animal in the field guide after a trip - ie. many of my travels were difficult backpack trips and the field guide was left in the car to save weight!!

this is the one to take! Like carrying a park ranger in your backpack to help you know what you are looking at. Trees and wildflowers, animals of the land, sky and water, minerals, stars of the night sky. Increase your knowledge and understanding of the beautiful places you visit and your own backyard. Check out the Audubon Field Guides to Florida and other regions as well. Well worth the money. Lots of color photographs and well organized for easy use.

This is a delight to come home to after a walk or a trip to the river. I try to bring a wildflower home to check out in the book, and am never let down.

While it seems almost an impossible undertaking to include four very large states in one book, in fact the Range guide helps focus the book quite a bit.

As an artifact, the book is well made and should last some time.

I just read BLUE RIDE and would like to agree with the reader review from Chicago. Blue Ride is the true California desert, as I knew it during 33 years of living there, before the growing spread of tourism and overdevelopment. Blue Ride evokes the mystery of the pure desert, the ramshackle towns with colorful characters, the freedom of the open road in pre-homogenized America. It also serves as a documentation of a unique place and time in Southern California. The author's quirky adventures are very compelling

I liked "Blue Ride" a lot. As I read, I felt like I'd entered another world, away from the crowded cities, television and popular culture. The stories actually do--as the book cover states-- "emerge from the desert roads and outback towns of the American Southwest". The author has revealed the marrow of an uncommon life in the Southern California Badlands.

I would like to enter a reader review of Ken Wilkerson's "Blue Ride", which I found to be very engaging. It's woven together like a series of vignettes, with recurring characters living around the highways and small towns of the Southern California desert. It starts off with a fast, allegorical tale of alienation---then moves on to an amusing misadventure in a bordertown bar--- then a story about a couple amiable drifters on an existential search---then the jaded narrative of "Jack Chase", an on-the-skids detective---then it continues on, revisiting the participants in various desert locales. Along the ride are visitations from two artists, Andy Wilf and Gram Parsons, who lived similarly chaotic lives, and an account of the author and a companion as they journeyed on foot down an ancient Indian trail. There's a lot of heart, humor, craziness, adventure, compulsive wandering, tequila and contemporary lore of the desert packed into 122 pages. This is a solid piece of work.

Not my favorite Hillerman book, but still pretty interesting and entertaining. Won't hurt anyone to read something like this just for fun!

Tony Hillerman's book are often marketed as quick paperback reads. Sure they are mysteries at heart but they are more than mysteries. Hillerman asks the reader to think.

In this book, Hillerman is pondering heavy questions. The first underlying theme is whether Chee should leave the reservation for a job with the FBI. Since Chee does lots of driving in the book, we share many hours of internal debate on the issue. The second and more subtle theme involves aging and wisdom. While the core of the mystery involves middle-aged folks, many of the most valuable witnesses are very elderly. They are the people many investigators would ignore. I found the Chee's interviews with the seniors to be top flight writing.

The actual plot is ok. Chee has to spend more time in Los Angeles that I enjoyed. Still, city life for Native Americans is a reality. There were a couple of annoying redundancies as certain plot points were revisited. The survivalist bad guy was pretty over the top and his excesses were quite unnecessary.

Bottom-line: Not my favorite Hillerman but not a waste of time by any definition. For those who like to read their books in order, this is number six in the greater Chee/Leaphorn series.

This is the sixth of Hillerman's "Navajo Detective" series and the third in which Jim Chee is the main character. In "Ghostway" Hillerman explores the conflict of a Navajo drawn to the White world. Jim Chee is in love with a White school teacher, Mary Landon, and he contemplates marrying her and leaving the reservation to take a job as an FBI agent. But he is also pulled in the opposite direction to become a "singer" and preserve the Navajo ceremonies that are being forgotten as the old timers die off. Chee's preoccupation with the personal choices he must make are always near the surface of this mystery novel.

Hillerman, as always, celebrates the magnificience of the Navajo land and the Navajo's sensitivity to their natural surroundings. And, as always, the knowledge of their land and people give Hillerman's detectives the insight they need to solve the mystery.

"Ghostway" begins with a shootout in the parking lot of a laundromat in Shiprock, New Mexico that leaves two men dead. The story is not one of Hillerman's best or most credible but the character of Margaret Sosi, an entrancing, 15-year old girl wearing a black pea coat makes up for plot deficiencies. We want this girl to live -- but Hillerman readers know he has cruelly killed off children in other novels in the series.

Hillerman novels contain no sex whatsoever, but "Ghostway" comes closer than about any other to intimating that Jim Chee and Mary Landon might have engaged in something more than romantic conversation.

Ni en las recetas ni en los ingredientes...
Una auténtica falta de respeto al verdadero taco !

I haven't actually read the book. I put down 5 stars because you have to put something in and I didn't want to mis-rate the book without having read it.

I noticed that her recipe for Tacos El Campo includes coriander seeds. Quite a large portion,too. As often as I have seen coriander leaf (cilantro) used in Mexico, I can't remember ever seeing coriander seeds or powder used in any recipes. So I suspect she is not offering "authentic" recipes?

Next. Does she explain where the word "taco" comes from? It would seem to me that a history of the word would be an important part of any book on tacos. Does she provide any kind of history and does she talk about the Lebanese influence on tacos which lead to "tacos al pastor" , or, as they are still called in Puebla, "tacos arabes"?

Next. Does she offer recipes for making the crispy puffed up taco shells that show up around Texas?

More (mas) of little cookbooks like this well done! Found while vacationing in Sedona! Wonderful creativity with a dish almost everyone loves: tacos. Photos are colorful and excellent -- tempting to make just looking!

Tantalizing taco variations such as Smoked Salmon with Cilantro Creme or my favorite: Pork Tenderloin with a Jalepeno Glaze.

The mas comes from a small but delightful section on accompaniments, such as salsas and refried beans, chili con carne, etc.

Great gift giving as author suggests! Or gift yourself and your diners by getting one yourself -- you'll use this one alot as I.

My husband and I have tried the tortilla, menudo, and pico de gallo recipes and they were tasty.
Some ingredients are hard to find, depending on where you live.
Worth having if you love Mexican food.

This book is more comprehensive than any I've ever come across. Moving from Boston a few months back-- my partner has already exclaimed, "You cook like you've lived here all your life!" Good, solid recipes, no hype. Bene!

Excellent, interesting recipes that work. I'm not a big southwestern cuisine fan, but I cook from this book regularly, and I consider it one of the all-time great additions to my cookbook library. MUST MAKE: salsas, roast chicken, elemental arrechares, and the best chili you've ever eaten (Dora's Carne con Chile). Throw out that Old El Paso box that is languishing in your pantry, and get cooking!

This is the fourth book in Tony Hillerman's masterpiece "Navajo Detectives" series and one of the best of the whole series. In the first three books Lt. Joe Leaphorn is the main character. "People of Darkness" introduces Sgt. Jim Chee, a younger and more complex man who is torn between the white man's world - and a career in the FBI - and the Navajo way as a "singer" or shaman. Also introduced in this book is an appealing, peaches-and-cream Wisconsin girl, Mary Landon, as a mild love interest for Chee.

A bomb goes off in a hospital parking lot, apparently aimed at killing a man who is already dying of cancer, a box containing little of apparent value disappears from a rich man's house, and an oil well explosion thirty years back has some connection to these events. This is vintage Hillerman: a story than ranges over vast areas of time and space. The villain in "People of Darkness" is one of Hillerman's best: a cold professional with the vulnerability of a battered child.

Hillerman's strengths are authenticity and atmosphere. Elements of Navajo culture, religion, and folkways are woven into the fabric of his novels. His landscapes are harsh and spectacular. Nature is magnificent, but also menacing. In this exotic setting, the supernatural seems almost possible and little chilly fingers tickle your spine. If you are an urbanite, you may not like Hillerman; but if you are drawn to big, blank spots on the map you will likely love him. Not the least of his accomplishments is that he has probably taught more people about the Navajo -- and generated more interest in Navajo culture -- than any other writer.

The title refers to the members of an underground Native American Church peyote cult whose totem is the mole, "the predator of the nadir." The mystery involves the attempted murder of a dying man, the disappearance of his corpse from the hospital morgue, a uranium mine, a fatal oil-well explosion 30 years earlier, and the theft of a keepsake box filled mostly with black rocks. This novel has the distinction of featuring the scariest, most chilling villain of the series: an emotionless, psychopathic, methodical killer for hire who leaves nothing to chance. The suspense builds as the point of view alternates between the killer's and Navajo policeman Jim Chee's. "People of Darkness" is one of the best in a literate and very entertaining Southwestern series. For other well-written American Indian-related mysteries, try James D. Doss' Shaman series and Margaret Coel's Arapaho series.

To me, this is is Hillerman's second-best mystery (after "Dance Hall of the Dead"). Introducing a new detective seems to have sparked his creativity, and his cast of characters is one of the best he ever created (although he seems to have recycled some of them in later books). His hired killer is a psycho but still sympathetic, the fragile blond schoolteacher is tougher than she looks, and even the minor characters (such as the lab technician in the first scene) are well done. Jim Chee is a complex, interesting personality from the very beginning. As usual, the various settings in which the story takes place are vividly described. And "how he done it" involves, in my opinion, one of the cleverest murder weapons in the history of the detective novel. This is a winner all the way through.