No comments about Faces of Exploration: Encounters with 50 Extraordinary Pioneers.

No comments about Soaring With the Schweizers: The Fifty-Year History of Their Aviation Adventures.

No comments about Oldtimers of Southwest Texas.

2 comments about Canyons of the Colorado (Large Print Edition).

1. This book's photographs are gorgeous--though there's not enough of them--of snow covered mesas, sacred datura, Bryce Canyon (which isn't really on the Colorado at all), streambeds, waterfalls, canyon walls, cactus, clouds, and shadows.
   The introduction is by conservationist David Brower, and is a little pretentious, but most of the text is straight from explorer John Wesley Powell's own account of his trips in the late-1800s, and the photos do a great job of making that text seem especially readable.
   There are A TON of books about the Colorado River and the Colorado Plateau...and this...this is another one of them. It's a good one though, and worth considering--whether you're obsessed with reading every single book on the subject, or whether you'd just like one nice one to leave out on your coffee table.



2. As prior reviews state, the text is well-selected from Powell's journal, and the photographs are superb. But how can the author publish the journal of an explorer without a map keyed to the dates of journal entries? The photographs are superb, but again, not keyed to a map, or even associated with the text. The identifying data for each photo is listed in the front of the book, but is not given on, or near the photograph. A potentially superb book, but, because of these defects and faults, one that is maddening to read.

1 comments about The Moon Pool.

1. It is the turn of the twentieth century and science promises to explain many of the wonders of the world. Walter T. Goodwin is an eminent scientist who has just finished a field study of the flora of the volcanic islands of the South Pacific. At Port Moresby, in Papua New Guinea, he boards a ship headed for Melbourne, in Australia. From there he intends to travel further to his home in New York. Having boarded the ship he finds to his surprise that his old friend Dr. David Throckmartin is also a passenger. But Throckmartin seems strangely distant and changed. His face wears an expression of both extreme ecstasy and horror weirdly co-existing. Throckmartin tells Goodwin that he has discovered the ruins of an extremely ancient city on an island of the coast of Papua. In these ruins he discovered a strange door, which led to an underground pool. From this pool, during the rising of the full moon, an apparently supernatural creature emerges. This creature steals away people, turning them into zombie like creatures who then disappear underground never to be seen again. Throckmartin's wife Edith has been taken as well as two other members of the scientific party. Throckmatin, however, has a plan to travel to Melbourne, collect some necessary scientific equipment and return to the 'moon pool' to rescue his wife. All this of course seems too much to believe, but then the 'creature', the "Dweller", arrives and steals away Throckmartin before Goodwin's very eyes. Goodwin decides the only thing he can do is to try to compete Throckmartin's rescue plan.
   
   Just about everything in this story is given a 'scientific' explanation by Goodwin, the die-hard-rationalist narrator of the tale. The story is thus technically science fiction, however, these 'explanations', at least to the modern reader's mind, seem so thin that the tale in fact has the feel of fantasy. Merritt seems particularly taken with the then new field of nuclear physics and this gives the story interesting depth. Merritt is aware of the possibility of nuclear science promising great benefit, but also great harm. The luminous "Dweller" is thus a predecessor of Godzilla, the radioactive movie monster that destroyed Tokyo, though Merritt, of course, wrote well before the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped.
   
   Of course this book, like all others, takes its place in the history of literature and owes some of its details to earlier novels. The phosphorescent walls of an underground kingdom is highly reminiscent of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (Unabridged Classics) (1864). The discovery of a lost civilization which is ruled by a totally amoral, iron willed woman is straight from Rider Haggard's She (Oxford World's Classics) (1887).
   
   I must warn that this is not an easy book to read because of the complex writing style. Merritt uses long and winding sentences that are difficult to keep track of. I found myself sometimes going back and rereading what I had just read to understand it. Also Merritt at times uses a super-profusion of adjectives, most of which are little used in common language. I at first ran to the dictionary, but soon gave up, letting the worlds roll over me in a strange, hypnotic, half-understood, poetic spell that added to the weird atmosphere of the book.
   
   I don't mean to be overcritical of the book. is in fact a rip-roaring read full of high adventure. Merritt certainly manages to keep you turning the pages. The ending is great, keeping you on the edge to the last page. No anticlimaxes here.

No comments about Lincoln's first years in Illinois,: A reprint of "Early pioneers and pioneer events".

No comments about Marco Polo.

No comments about Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit.

5 comments about Desert wife,.

1. This book covers the four years Hilda Faunce spent with her husband, Ken, who was an Indian trader on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. Their wagon trip from Oregon to Covered Waters trading post is an adventure in itself, but the real story is the day to day pre-WWI life as lived by this couple and the Indian families who traded with them. We get an unusually rich glimpse of reservation life through the eyes of a woman whose very wise, competent husband (who speaks Navajo) teaches her the ways of the desert and these people he admires.
   
   By today's standards, Hilda's use of the words "heathen" and "savage" may seem racist, but she spoke without derision and it reflected what was normal vocabulary of the time. Also by today's standard, we might marvel at Hilda's oddly formal relationship with her husband, whose wisdom and skills she clearly respects. In one very dramatic turn of events, she describes Ken's life-threatening illness and how she coped with the loss of his assistance as well as the possibility that he could die. There is never a moment of self-pity in these people's lives; they did their jobs and were dependent upon one another. They expected life to be difficult.
   
   We feel like invisible visitors to the thin shell of a trading post--a perfect analogy for the fragile relationship Ken and Hilda had with the Navajo. They constantly walked the cultural divide that separated them despite their mutually beneficial roles.



2. This is an account of a woman's journey from the wilds of Oregon to the wilds of Arizona around the turn of the century. These are honest and simply told tales of life on the frontier told with an innocence and freshness that captures the reader. This is a western classic.



3. I couldn't put this book down. I felt as though i was alongside the wagon on it's way from Oregon towards the "Four Corners", and with Hilda & Ken through life at their trading post. Early 1900's life on Navajo Land was anything but simple. Hilda's writings carry you with her through suspense, joys, dancing, humour, births, sickness, deaths, everything we experience now, but as a white woman in an Indian world in a time when life was much more basic, survival was difficult & and instant gratification didn't exist...I loved it!



4. Hilda Faunce Wetherill uses pseudonyms for some people and sites in this book and the editor does not call that to our attention. The name of the trading post she describes as 'Covered Water Trading Post' is actually Black Mountain Trading Post about 20 miles west of Chinle, Arizona. She refers to Lorenzo Hubbell Sr. as 'Mr Taylor' and his daughter, Barbard Hubbell Goodman, as 'Mrs. Gray.' She also refers to the Hubbell Trading Post at Ganado, Arizona, as 'lugontale.' (See pages 125-126 and 144-145, "Indian Trader- The Life and Times of J. L. Hubbell", Martha Blue,2000. Walnut, California: Kiva Publishing Company).
   
   She mentions that her husband bought the trading post but, in fact, she and her husband managed the Black Mountain Trading Post for Lorenzo Hubbell Sr. who bought the post in 1914. The Hubbell family continued to own the post after Lorenzo Hubbell's death in 1930 and they operated it until 1937. (see page 284, Appendix Two, "Indian Trader - The Life and Times of J. L. Hubbell", Martha Blue, 2000. Walnut, California: Kiva Publishing Company)



5. The third installment of Living Voices of the Past is another wonderful history lesson!

   Hilda Faunce leaves her comfortable Seattle, Washington, home to journey to the Southwest and the Navajo reservation with her husband in 1914. While one may think that everybody had cars back then, the Faunce's made their way in the manner of the original pioneers: by wagon.

   Hilda's journey is not so much a journal of her trip as it is her life on the reservation between 1914 and 1918. Hilda's writings are indeed an historical eye-opener.

   First, there is the problem with the language; then the protocol; and the normal daily variances of two races trying to live side-by-side. Cultural diversity may be a late-twentieth-century term, but the fact is that many in America were already experiencing this phenomenon.

   The entire journal is mesmerizing; Hilda uses very descriptive language to convey the sights and sounds of the unusual customs and landscapes that she encounters that transfers the listener to reservation life during the second decade of the twentieth century.

   Two aspects were particularly telling of a different culture: contending with a white-man initiated illness and the onset of World War I.

   The Navajo's were forced to face and contend with small pox, a deadly disease they had never known until the white man arrived. Many of Hilda's new friends died, devastating the young woman.

   Newspapers were a rarity and treat on the reservation, so Hilda did not know much of what was going on outside her and her husband's little trading post. While the world was trying to blow itself to smithereens, the Faunce's and the Indians were trying to make a living by mainly trading...especially furs and foods.

   Desert Wife is an important historical document that from which we can all learn tolerance and the need to just get along!

No comments about Captain John Smith: and His Brave Adventures (H Books).