Travel Books

This is one of the most interesting books in the series. The series is fantasy, and I recommend it to grades 2-4. This is great for kids and it gives you facts about what or where they are near. This is probably one of the best series books I have ever read.

This book was fantastic. Jack and Annie went back to when knights were around. They walked around a castle. They fell in a moat and the knight saved them.

I learned some interesting facts. The knights wore armor when they traveled long and dangerous distances. A helmet could weigh up to 40 pounds. I learned that drawbridges crossed moats. Moats helped protect the castle from enemies.

I would recommend this book for three reasons. One reason is you can learn lots of stuff about knights and castles. Another reason is because Jack and Annie can go back in time and have an adventure. A third reason because Jack was protecting his sister Annie when they fell in the moat.

The Knight at Dawn is an interesting book about two kids.

Do you want to read a book that's really mysterious? Well, the book Magic Tree House #2 is the book! Do you wish that your tree house could take you wherever you want to go? Well, Jack and Annie have a tree house like that. Once they got to the creepy castle, with a knight. When they got there they got shocked because they got caught by a knight. You have to find out what happens next.

What I really like about the book is when Jack and Annie ride on the knight's horse.

I would recommend this book to people who like Magic Tree House books.

I liked this book. It had a lot of exciting parts.It was interesting and funny. I liked the characters Jack and Annie. They went back to the time of Knights and found a castle. The character Jack reminded me of a friend I know. Jack try's to take care of his little sister Annie and my friend likes to take care of the little kids too.
By Brian of Stockbridge Central School

My 1st grader hates to put it down, he would rather read Magic Tree House books, than play video games. He even reads them to his class and explains the story for show and tell. In his kindergarten class the teacher would also let him read the Magic Tree House books out loud, not to give her a break, but to promote reading out loud. Great books!

In comparison to the National Geographic Trail illustrated maps Tom Harrison Maps have more user features such as more trail mileage markers and they are slightly more detailed scale. I like the colors of the Natl Geo maps better though. I really like how he's broken his JMT maps into one day's worth of hiking so that you only need one sheet out at a time.
Note this map pack is centered on the JMT if you are looking for other hikes near the JMT or the connector trails to the various trailheads there is very little additional coverage. If you are actually hiking the JMT only they are excellent.

Tom creates the best maps around. I don't know he does it all by himself. I love having the UTM grid on each page. Each of the 13 pages has just the right amount of detail for my through hike. I think you would be foolish to do the JMT without these.

If you are planning on hiking the JMT, buy this! It is EXACTLY what you need and no more.

I've used the same set of Harrison's JMT maps a couple of times now, the first hike took 30 days and second took 18. They're durable, for sure. The scale (1:63,360) is appropriate for the set of 13 8.5"x11" maps - if you really, really hustle you can hike a map per day. The size means you don't have to unfold a huge sheet of paper each time you want to check where you are. The mileage between waypoints on the trail is clearly marked. The maps don't have the detail of 7.5-minute USGS maps but you wouldn't want that kind of detail for this hike. Harrison also has some larger maps, e.g., "Sequoia & King's Canyon Nat'l Parks" with a 1:125,000 scale but the size is inconvenient for the JMT hike. Conceivably you could scissor his larger maps to make a map of the trail but since he's already done the job about perfectly, why bother? (Incidentally the JMT runs between Mt. Whitney and Yosemite's Happy Isles, so being disappointed at not getting a Mexico-to-Canada map doesn't make very much sense.)

I purchased this Tom Harrison map set to thru-hike the JMT. At the same time I ordered the maps from the national park service. The T.H. maps are thin, tearproof, waterproof, lightweight and they pack down into a small size. The NPS maps are paper, they tear easily, they'd be damaged easily by water, and because they cover the 3 parks/national forests, rather than just the trail, they are about 10 times as large and heavier. When I go hiking later this year, the T.H. maps are coming with me. The NPS maps are staying at home.

Our family loves these books. We originially came across them at the library and purchased this one to have in our collection. The illustrations are so beautifully done, I would highly recommend purchasing the full-sized hardback books. The smaller paperback book collections just don't seem to be as much fun to read.

When my first born turned one (almost 12 years ago), a friend gave this to her for a birthday present. Over the years, and with the addition of our second child, this book continues to be in our top 3 books. We still pull it out to read -- it's never far away!

I now "pass it forward" and buy it as a gift for baby/young children presents.

This sweet book is one of my four-year-olds favorites, and mine too. I enjoy reading it to her as much as she enjoys hearing it. The illustrations say as much or more than the words. It's a great story for validating the child who loves home and the one who loves to "visit".

I have become a HUGE fan of every Toot and Puddle book available and want to collect them all. I've found they have a wide age appeal, from 2 years on up to....well, I'm 28. Such clever adventures and experiences are depicted in each book and the illustrations could be the artwork in my child's room. In fact, I'd buy the prints if they were available. Great book!

This adventure with Toot and Puddle is one of my all-time favorites. It is an adorable story about two friends, one who loves to travel the world and the other who loves just staying at home in Woodcock Pocket, USA. The postcards that Toot sends Puddle from his world travels are cute and humorous! The illustrations in this book are incredible. This is a book that adults and children alike will enjoy together. I never get tired of reading this one over and over. It is a book my children will keep and pass on to their children!!

Alex Kotlowitz's "There Are No Children Here" is rightly held up as one of the greatest works of journalistic nonfiction of the last twenty-five years. His "Never a City So Real," though, falls somewhat flat precisely because he tries to write an anecdotal series of re-creations of "Children."

This book is readable and even interesting, but fails at introducing its reader to much of Chicago as a city. It contains almost no history and focuses solely on poorer, fringe neighborhoods while neglecting many more central (and historically important) points of interest. An interesting diversion, but one that is too skewed by Kotlowitz's politics to serve as anything more than that.

Alex Kotlowicz mostly succeeds with this slice-of-life look at Chicago's grittier side. He begins by interviewing Ed Sadlowski, former steelworker and union official living on the southeast side where most of the mills have shuttered. Equally interesting was the view from Edna's restaurant in the west side ghetto where there are few businesses other than liquor stores. We also hear from an artist that paints murals for residents in public housing, a neighborhood of recent immigrants from many lands, a gadfly that fights corruption in the border suburb of Cicero (former headquarters of Al Capone), and several others. In many ways the author captures the city's feel, and allows readers to see how Chicago has evolved into a mostly post-industrial city, yet one where poverty and fear of minorities and violence remain touchstones for some.

Oddly the author, who moved here 20 years ago from New York City, alternates praise with suggestions that the most successful see Chicago as unlovely and leave. In reality, most stay put in middle-class neighborhoods (or suburbs), acknowledging the city's problems, but prideful of our vibrant economy, superb lakefront, museums, parks, skyline, and universities - Chicago leads the USA in Nobel Prize winners. Despite small flaws, this is a revealing, concise, readable book.

Sometimes a book is "fine". This is one such book. I'd recommend it, but not very very strongly.

This waste of ink, paper, and time isn't even useful as a doorstop. This book is not about Chicago, it is about the author's politics (which is communism disguised as liberalism.)

Early in the book, the author claims that the owners of Chicago steel companies got complacent and forgot how to compete. The fact of the matter is that meeting the demands of the unions priced the steel much higher than the units arriving from East Europe and Asia. This is the first of so many instances that the author proves he is uninformed. He is also inaccurate in geography, history, and one funny instance of a math goof.

Don't waste your time.

A Walk in Chicago: Never a City So Real
by Alex Kotlowitz
Crown Journeys, Crown: New York 2004 159 pp. Hardcover

The "Big Onion" is better than the "Big Apple" in many ways, and Alex Kotlowitz, a former New Yorker who has made Chicago his home for over twenty years, sets out to prove how great and diverse his adopted city really is. As he writes in his introduction, "Chicago is a place of passion and hustle...a place eternally in transition, always finding yet another way to think of itself, a city never satisfied."

But this is not the Chicago of the Art Institute, of Michigan Avenue, of Water Tower Place, or the Magnificent Mile. This is the Chicago of the South Side housing projects, the South East's closed steel mills, of Division Street and the 26th Street Criminal Court. It is the Chicago of the resilient and dedicated people who make their own neighborhoods places that come to life with positive energy and social change.

In Kotlowitz's book you meet "Oil Can Eddie," AKA, Ed Sadlowski, the retired steelworker who climbed the ranks of union leadership and "...who loves his city's opera, its museums, and its baseball teams..." You read about how this steelworker went from the steel furnace to the cover of Time Magazine, and how the union that he organized created a better life for its workers, and how that working life is now in peril. The 64-year old Sadlowski takes Kotlowitz on a city tour in his beat-up "Crown Vic" to places off the tourist map, places like Pinkerton's gravesite and the Calumet Riverfront where the strikers once clashed with police.

You get to lunch at Manny's Jewish Deli just south of the Loop, the hangout for political bosses and pit stop for every major politician who swings through Chicago. Then it's off to Edna's soul food restaurant with his two social worker friends, Millie and Brenda. As they sit down to eat, we get to overhear their conversation as if we were sitting in the next booth. This lets the reader eavesdrop on some of the problems that plague this city, from gangs in public housing to unwed teenage mothers. But in Kotlowitz's hands, the city is brought to life through the eyes of Millie and Brenda. And we get to meet Edna, sixty-six years old, who in the middle of taking lunch orders hears gunshots and runs out onto the street to shoo away the gang kids with her apron.

We meet Milton Reed, the lanky street artist who paints provocative murals for the residents of the projects, and we tag along while Milton sets up his sketch pad on the street corner so that he can sketch portraits of parade watchers as the Bud Billiken Parade winds its way through the city's South Side, a still racially divided part of Chicago.

Next we meet the embodiment of Sandburg's "City of Big Shoulders" in the form of a sturdily built six-foot female attorney, Andrea Lyon, who once while being attacked for her bag, punched her mugger so hard she broke his jaw. This imposing former public defender now works as a De Paul law professor and takes on some of the city's toughest criminal cases. It's a riveting account of the goings-on in this huge criminal beehive of a courthouse, and how Andrea heats up the proceedings.

And we also meet a painter who paints the derelicts and prostitutes on Division Street near Wicker Park, and who has sold his work for many thousands of dollars in Paris, but who remains unknown in his own city. Robert Guinan paints the side of the city that is fast becoming gentrified out of existence and we hear him lament that the city is trying to homogenize itself. Guinan takes us into his studio and down to the jazz clubs like the HotHouse and the Velvet Lounge where he has painted the famous Blues musicians that have made Chicago legendary.

We even go outside the city limits to Cicero, a suburb made infamous by Al Capone, to meet Dave Boyle, political gadfly and social activist, who runs a legal clinic for Cicero's disenfranchised. In Boyle's account, we learn how he foiled the town's corrupt politicians by exposing them to the truth of their actions when he tried to have illegal liquor licenses revoked.

And finally, near the end of our tour in the city's northwest side at GT's Diner, a diner taken over by an Albanian immigrant who hands out free coffee and food to the Mexican day laborers who congregate in the parking lot outside his business, we read how he grumbles about the ones who don't pay and who sit all day in his booths, but we also learn why he sympathizes because as a child in Albania he learned from his parents that you have to help others.

We read about how the city keeps changing in Kotlowitz's book as new immigrants arrive and change old neighborhoods, but we learn how much they add to the life of this great city. Wherever Kotlowitz takes us, we learn to love "his Chicago" and the very real people he introduces us to. These are the people that you would love to meet and sit down with in a bar to talk to for hours. Fortunately, Kotlowitz has done the sitting for us, taking it all down in this brilliant book.

Great book for anyone visiting or living in Colorado. A comprehensive guide to your travels. I live in and travel around Colorado frequently, and this book is a must!!

The book appeared to be new and arrived several days before the projected arrival date.

Stephen Hall's book is a honest guide for aspiring food manufacturers who are new to the specialty food industry, and most importantly, who have limited funds to sustain a long-term marketing effort. Though he does discuss various important aspects of the industry as a whole, his emphasis is on marketing.

He uses real-world examples of entrepreneurs that have either succeeded or failed in bringing their product(s) to market and in some cases due to being under-capitalised or not being prepared to handle the demand for their products once they had become successful. Make no mistake, Mr. Hall in no way sugarcoats the process. In fact, in the chapter where he discusses start-up costs, he stresses the importance of an independent source of income to successfully start your business, especially for the first 3-5 years. But this a positive rather than a negative point, because it encourages you to be realistic and to prepare for success rather than set yourself up for failure.

His intention is to inform and he does so clearly by using flowcharts and explaining indepth the various aspects of the specialty food market. He covers important issues such as defining the best U.S. territories for your product; researching the markets; developing and positioning your product; government regulations (a list of the relevant agencies for each process of the business is provided); packaging, labeling, pricing, warehousing and shipping your product; principles for marketing success; promoting, publicizing and advertising; finding buyers; arranging deals; finding copackers, and much more.

There is a lot of valuable information to process and I found myself reading the book a second time (and most likely will do so a third time as a refresher). I highly recommend this book as a good foundation and to get you started in the right direction.

This is a good book, but not exactly what I was expecting. As a Small Business Consultant, I was asked to teach a class on marketing your food product for a local food incubator, which is beginning level. This is great if you want to have your mustard in a national chain, your tea or coffee on grocery store shelves, or the like. What I thought it would help with was entry level marketing to get your food into local stores, selling on the internet, and getting into a trade show. It did give guidance to higher levels of the same thing, and was very professionally done, just a bit above what I was expecting. If you already have an established product and do large scale production, this is a great book for you. For beginners, it doesn't really take it right out of the kitchen...its sort of a couple notches past that.

Excellent author and wonderful expertise though. Definitely a keeper for my personal library.

This book was recommended in a class at the local community college on starting a food business. There are
excellent examples of various business models and lots of referrals to other helpful web sites. If you have a
specialty food product you're making in your kitchen and you dream of selling it, this book is perfect.

This book is a goldmine of information about the gourmet food business and how to get your product out there. Many charts, templates and other business resources that are not found in any other book I've read. Loved the "real world" examples.

My biggest questions are: What are the laws about the sale of food from the kitchen? Is a health inspection of the kitchen necessary? Where would I find this information for the state in which I live?

This book does not cover any of the information that I think is necessary. I enjoy preparing food and giving it away in pretty containers. I was hoping I could sell some of my gorgeous and delicious gifts with little overhead. According to the author, one should plan on laying out a rather large investment for this type of business.

FROM KITCHEN TO MARKET contains many details but omits the basic information required to get started.

If you have ever dreamed of living in a foreign country, this book will enlighten and entertain you. Two ordinary, extraordinary people who went to France for work, and stayed.

The book is a charming account of a life in France.
It might seem self-indulgent, but one should note
the humble origins of the authors.

some of the anecdotes are interesting, i found overall the book was a featherweight and self- aggrandizing.

This was my introduction to Patricia Wells, about whom I've heard and read so much over the years. Her cookbooks may be wonderful, but the writing in this book certainly is not. The language is uninspired and the details she and her journalist husband choose to share about themselves are almost embarrassing. There also wasn't a single recipe that sounded appealing. The descriptions of Provence were lovely, and it's nice that they've made such a happy life for themselves, but somehow the way they present it all just comes off wrong. Readers would be much better served by picking up Jacques Pepin's charming memoir, The Apprentice.

I bought the actual book (not on my kindle)because I was looking forward to the photos and recipes, what a mistake!
The photos are dull. I noticed two of the recipes were already published (in slightly different form) from her "P. W. Home in Provence" book (Grape Harvest Cake and Corsican Ricotta Cheesecake).
More disturbing pages 183 and 202 of this new book have exact passages from the Introduction of her "P. W. Home in Provence" book. Isn't there an editor anywhere? Is this legit to pass off without attribution?

I really enjoyed this book so much, a little out of the norm of what I normally read, although I do read some fantasy and science fiction, but something about the description of this book caught my eye. It reminded me a little of James Rollins. I love James Rollins, but his books are like reading movies and kind of "out there" pretty unrealistic. But maybe that is why I enjoy them and I felt the same about this book. It was just good fun, I liked the characters, I liked that he used a World War Two setting, and I found the societies on the other side of that storm, really fun. Well, if you can call the Grik fun....anyway, this is a great book to spend some time with and I can't wait until the sequel.

The only things I liked about this book is the descriptions of life aboard a WWII destroyer and the battle with Japanese before "The Squall". Obviously the author knows what he is talking about, and has strong feelings on the topic. Seagoing simians were okay, but nothing exciting -- basically humans with tails. They are primates, so they ought to be fairly similar to us. Other than that, though...

1. The characters are boring and typecast. Even people who give the book 4 or 5 stars seem to agree with this.

2. The sea ecology is impossible. Sure, there were real sea monsters in Mesozoic, but never in THESE numbers! It's a marine equivalent of fantasy books (or D&D Wilderness Encounter table) where a top predator is hiding behind every tree.

3. The Grik are by far the worst feature of the book. Their social organization and motivations make no sense at all. Granted, their social organization and motivations are not explained, but I have a suspicion the author did not even bother to think them through. Large numbers of Grik coordinate their actions across entire Indian Ocean, yet act as bloodthirsty berserkers with no understanding of tactics -- except when plot requires that they DO understand them. I think the author simply wanted a totally evil non-human enemy, with no moral ambiguities and possibility of negotiation. An all-too common -- and lazy, IMO, -- occurrence in recent military SF.

Although I was torn between four stars and five, and ultimately gave it four, this is an excellent book that is highly recommended. There are precious few books that leave you disappointed when you're done reading them because there isn't more to read, but this is one of them.

Anderson is a gifted writer. The book is very readable; the story flows; the dialogue is first rate; and the plot is well-conceived with enough twists to keep it interesting without being outlandish.

Anderson has created a fascinating alternate world with two races of non-human sentient beings who are involved in a death struggle. Into this alien world falls an American destroyer from the Asiatic fleet in the early, desperate days of World War II. The use of an obsolete destroyer from the early 1940s was a great idea. No jets flying off a modern day aircraft carrier; just some modest sized guns on a beat-to-hell ship. Anderson does a nice job of filling in some details of the Lemurian society, which gives the book a realistic feel.

Why not five stars? A few reasons. The lemurs are intelligent, fair-minded, inquisitive and peaceful at heart. The Grik are evolved raptors who have gained intelligence but lost none of the viciousness that marked their ancient ancestors. They are the epitome of evil. That is perhaps not far-fetched, but it is rather predictable. There is virtually no description of Grik society other than they are evil killers. It isn't clear that they have language, although they clearly must. The only true criticism is that everything is a bit too convenient. Need oil? No problem. Just happen to have picked up an Australian oil engineer and there are two crew members who worked on the Texas oil rigs. Can't speak to the Lemurians? No problem. They can learn English in about a week. These are really minor criticisms, and don't really detract from the overall quality of the book.

Bottom line: Buy it. Read it. You'll enjoy it.

What a truely fantastic suprise!!! I talked about this book so much my father decided to read it too. He got very upset with about thirty to twenty pages to go. I asked why, and he told me he had figured out this book was part of a series, and now he would have to WAIT and WONDER as to the continuation and conclusion. I must say I agree with him. Very frustrating and exciting to be kept "on the hook" for several months. But in my opinion well worth the wait!!! Thank you Mr. Anderson.

I just finished Taylor's book "Destroyermen, Into The Storm" and totally loved it. I have been reading every book by Clive Cussler as they come out, and Taylor's writing is a step above. Sorry, Mr. Cussler. Taylor's approach to character definition is unparalleled. The historical representation of the 4 Stackers and the brave men that served on them is great. The representations of what they found on the other side of the storm is beyond belief. I have already pre-ordered the next two books of his series. Please don't stop with just this series. I have known for years that Taylor is a great 19th century artilleryman, and now I am glad to know how good a writer he is.

This looks like a very useful tool for once we are traveling, but a little less so for planning ahead.