Maryland Books

The map can easily be carried around, opened and folded. It is laminated and should last a long time. All the major touristy things to do are listed right there for you.

I purchased this map to use while on vacation and it was perfect for that purpose. It is laminated and the right size to fit in a hip pocket, purse, etc. The streets on the main map are printed large enough to easily read and many landmarks are clearly highlighted. There is an expanded map of the downtown area including Inner Harbor that does a fantastic job of showing you all the details you need to navigate the area. There are also indexes for streets, universities, museums, hotels, shopping, and other places of interest. While this is by no means an exhaustive street atlas, it does provide a great tool for someone visiting the city. It is especially useful if you plan to focus on the Inner Harbor area where all the major tourist attractions are. It was well worth the few dollars it cost.

Despite the copyright date, I have been using this map to get around Baltimore for the last three months and have yet to find anything outdated. City streets usually stay put. My only complaint is that it doesn't cover enough area. You are still very much in the city when you leave the part that the map covers. Overall, an extremely useful map.

This map had a copyright date from the early 90s, which wasn't mentioned in the product description. I doubt the map is up to date. I sent it back.

I bought this book a week ago. It is well organized and easy to use. not a wealth of information, but the color coded pages make it easy to identify quickly. If you want a lot of detail, this book is not for you.

Only big problem I have with the book is the quality of the binding. After barely a week of use, the pages are separating from the binding. I'm planning to return the book for a different guide that will last through rigorous field use.

My neighbor the birdwatcher loves this book. Birds are grouped according to color, so it's easy to identify the bird you've sighted. Photos are sharp and beautiful. The write-ups give nice info on size, nests, eggs, and habits. "Stan's Notes" provide additional observations. Fun, educational, and easy-to-use.

As a mostly clueless beginning birder, I found this book the perfect place to start. To ID a bird, the book says to first note the color. (And it's conveniently organized by color). Then it says to note the size: is it bigger than a robin or smaller? Within the color sections, the book is organized by bird size. Next the book has one note characteristics of the bird's bill, as well as other characteristics such as habitat, what the bird is eating, the way it perches, and how it looks in flight.

I find the book quite logical and helpful in identifying mystery birds. One somewhat annoying feature is that water birds are grouped in with non-water birds, but still the book is easy to use. Each bird has a decent color photo of a typical bird of that type. If the male and female are different, there's a picture of both. Juveniles are also described and sometimes pictured, such as a juvenile cardinal.

Basic information is provided: size in inches and centimeters, appearance of the female, male and juvenile, type of nest, number of broods per year, number of eggs, incubation, information on fledging, migration type, food, and information similar birds. For example, in the turkey vulture section, Stan tells you how to tell it apart from a black vulture. He also provides a helpful little map of Maryland and Delaware showing where you'll find a particular summer, winter or year-round.

I especially enjoy the "Stan's Note" section providing some interesting tidbits about the bird. For example, Stan notes that "The vulture's naked head is an adaptation to reduce risk of feather fouling (picking up diseases) from carcasses."

Overall, this is an excellent beginner's book covering 140 common species in Maryland and Delaware. The audio CD of bird calls is sold separately. In my local bookstore, it comes packaged with the book in a small leather binder, which I as a vegan am not happy about. I would love to have bought the both together without purchasing leather.

Coming from someone who grew up in the neighborhood where this crime happened and knowing the murderer, I found this book chilling. For those of us who knew him, Larry was anything but antisocial. He tried hard to please. I think the book depicted the case in very factual details. It's difficult to read even now many years after the incident.

Not your typical whodunnit, Sudden Fury is one of the better true crime books I've read. It's an emotional whodunnit of sorts, a chilling account of a boy abandoned into the foster care system who grew up to be violent. I especially liked the alternating story lines--the present-tense crime investigation alternating with the child's upbringing. I found the writing style objective in a way that made it compelling. The tragedy, I felt, was heightened by the fact the adoptive parents were so well meaning, however misguided they may have been. I felt the author struck a delicate balance between blaming the adoptive parents, the boy and the social welfare system for the horrible outcome. While depressing, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the psychology of violence.

As is typical of many of the current trough of poorly written "true crime" books, Sudden Fury begins by almost immediately letting you know "who done it". After that, it becomes just a dry recitation of the facts, including the background of the "abused" murderer. It leaves the reader wondering why she would bother writing a book when a simple magazine article could give almost as much factual information.

Of course, in the author's view, the victims' requiring their adopted sons to make decent grades, not steal, and obey society's rules is "abuse". The constant whining theme of "he just needs love" conveniently whitewashes the fact that the parents, though flawed themselves, adopted the children with the idea of doing just that, and the boys continually and willfully did wrong, often for no purpose other than to just show they could. Although it sounds like the father had a bad temper, even a patient parent would eventually get sick and tired of the antisocial behavior they were dealing with from two kids who, typical of adopted children, wanted "unconditional love" and continually pushed the limits to make their adoptive parents "prove" their love. (If you believe in "unconditional love", try cheating on or stealing from your spouse repeatedly, and then demand it.) These kids had free will, a great 2nd chance in life, and they stupidly threw it away with their selfish and sociopathic behavior. Not once does the author bring up the topic of "evil" or even mention in passing that perhaps if the young lad were so unhappy, he should have asked someone at his school to get him removed from that house.

Other incidents of "abuse" the author describes are: 1. not paying for his drivers ed class, and not letting him drive unless he passed all his courses. (Oh the horror!) 2. discouraging him from dating any girl more than once at 15-16 years of age to avoid problems with sex. (with over 60% of births now out of wedlock, not such an unwise idea at his age, and certainly not "abuse") 3. The father getting angry the night of the murder because the boy and his friends had ruined a computer disk containing countless hours of his father's accounting work and programming. I wonder what the author would say to her 16 y/o child if he had trashed her only copy of this book's manuscript after months of work. I'm sure she'd just smile and buy him an ice cream cone.

This "boy" will be getting out of jail before he's 30, probably, and god help the people who come accross him then. Unlike the theory of one person in the book, his problem wasn't his adoptive parents, it was his inability to understand that being adopted and having a tough childhood isn't carte blanche to vicimize the rest of us. If you want to prevent tradgedies like this, start making people who recklessly have children out of wedlock pay the price.

The victims' families should sue the author for libel, if they already haven't. Though perhaps overly rigid and imperfect, they were trying to help these kids, and the author used primarly the MURDERER'S point of view and that of their INSTITUTIONALIZED CRIMINAL older son to assasinate their character.

The final fact is, this "boy" CHOSE to murder two people because he didn't like their rules and "felt bad". Society is better off without such people and their excuse mongers as well.

This book is actually two stories--one takes place in the early 1990s Washington, D.C. and the other in 1738 Maidstone, MD. Marcy Heidish skilfully intertwines the two stories into one story with two parallel mysteries, characters, events, and with a touch of the supernatural thrown in for good measure. Other authors have tried this, and it often results in a choppy story, as the reader is pulled back and forth between the stories. Heidish is a success because I never had to go back to an earlier part of the novel to remind myself what had happened to the 20th century characters. The book begins ordinarily enough, with Alice Grey, owner of a bookstore in 1990s Washington, D.C. completing her novel about an 18th century midwife, Evangeline Smith, who is charged with witchcraft in Maidstone, MD in 1738. Alice is nearly done with her book when she feels compelled to do more research on her topic. (She literally receives a supernatural wake-up call from the past.) As she delves into the sources she should have read the first time, she begins to change her mind about Evangeline as she learns of multiple interpretations to events and to previously respected people. When she decides to find out the truth about Evangeline, that is when her life eerily begins to resemble Evangeline's final months, when she realizes that the people she thought were friends prove to be otherwise, and events in her life begin to parallel events in Evangeline's life 253 years earlier. There are some interesting and unexpected parallels done with the characters and their relationships, both romantic and platonic, in both settings. Heidish does a nice job in this book illustrating how people and events that may appear straightforward on the surface may actually be quite different once people decide to look below the surface.
This book is a good, fast read (I finished over a single weekend). I thought that the characters, both the heroines (& heros) and the villains were well developed, and I liked the storylines (both the 18th & 20th centuries).
What prevents me from rating this book 5 stars is the sense I have that the author (Heidish) had rushed to finish it and/or she had a page limit which she was close to exceeding when the novel ended. I found the ending to be rushed, and the destruction of the main character's (Alice Grey's) relationship with her best friend (who attempted a horrible crime against Alice) was brushed aside as if it were a matter of small consequence. The loss of any close friendship usually means some kind of introspection, and that was not demonstrated here. Readers are not given what Alice thought of this turn of events, nor how she dealt with it. I think that would have made a more satisfactory ending. Nonetheless, the positives outweigh the negatives, and if you like your mysteries with a twist, interesting characters, supernatural happenings to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up (but not so scary as to keep you up at night), and a well thought-out parallel story within the story, then this book is for you.

In this tale of history, horror and mysticism, events from more than 250 years ago take on a terrifying reality in the life of a 1990's woman.

Alice Grey inherited Wetherell's Rare and Used Books from her grandmother, who had taken Alice in after her parents were tragically killed. The shop was her community - she lived above it, provided a home to a nationally admired writers' group which attracted and nurtured both published and wannabe writers from all over the Washington area, and the people from the group and those who worked there were her friends.

Alice's latest book was the story of Evangaline Smith, an 18th century apothecary and midwife in a nearby settlement, who was sentenced to burn as a witch. As the investigation into Evangaline's life deepens, she becomes aware of startling parallels in their lives. It soon becomes apparent that the only way she can save herself and her reputation is to find out what really happened to Evangaline.

This well written book is skillfully and compellingly plotted, bringing the harsh, puritanical town of Maidstone in the 1730's as vividly to life as modern Georgetown. It seems greed, jealousy, and the lengths to which people will go to avoid being found out haven't changed at all.

If you like your thrillers with a bit of a spooky and mystical edge, this is for you.

I can't imagine why Marcy Heidish's entire fiction list is "out of print" - I borrowed this from my local library, and now I'm eager to read more of her work.

Marcy Heidish's book "The Torching" was an intricate web of the historical and the immiediate. She weaves a tale of a young woman, Alice Grey, who is obsessed with "rewriting" the history of an accused sorceress from the eighteenth century. There is an interesting twist as the events from the past come to parallel that which is occuring in the present. Heidish's see-saw between dream and reality makes this book a very tantalizing journey. However, many questions remain unanswered by the end of the novel. I felt it to be somewhat anti-climatic and I still wasn't entirely sure of the connections Heidish was trying to make. Despite this, it was still a fun read. Light but with enough thrills and suspense to give it depth. A pretty good book all around.

A beautiful book, nicely edited with notes so that you can get the obscure references, and funny--nay, uproarious--impromtu tall tales. Mencken and Goodman knowingly comment on the goings-on of all-too-human folk, with Olympian and sunlit wit and detachment. If you like to read Mencken, don't miss this one.

The discovery of a "new" book of H. L. Mencken's writing is always a special pleasure for those of us who love the old grouch and his work. This particular book, however, is something of an oddity. Anyone who has read much Mencken will be familliar with the style; from the scurrilous asides he liked to sprinkle into his narratives. In his published writing they served as a condiment, adding a scandalous spice to accounts of Political Conventions and the like. Here they are the whole meal, and it can become something of a muchness.

The subtitle "The Whimsical Letters..." is somewhat misleading. Whimsy has overtones of gentility, like two little old ladies exchanging stories about the faries that live in their gardens. Here we have two old so and so's raking up scandal in the "Old Neighborhood"; indulging in vulgarity, innuendo, and (had the subjects of their discourse been real) slander.

Fans of Mencken (and, presumably, of Goodman) will probably enjoy the book, although it is not a new Newspaper Days or Prejudices. Non fans should probably avoid it until they are familliar with Mencken and his world. This is not a good introduction.

C. Kay Larson has a lot of contextual material in this book, ranging from the first English translation of the Bible; to the history of Presbyterianism and its relation to the Know-Nothing movement; to Baltimore labor strikes; to the politics of the Mexican War, the 1860 election, postwar Maryland, and Reconstruction.

But for Civil War and Lincoln buffs go right to the Secession and Tennessee River campaign chapters. In these are apparently new facts on Confederate plans to stage a coup of Washington DC in April 1861 and Lincoln's appointment of Stanton (see James Wheeler's analysis above) to carry out the Tennessee R. campaign.

Carroll, herself, directly contributes with 3 newly discovered "Hancock" columns on Seward's, Bell's, Bates's and Botts's candidacies in the 1860 presidential election. Reprinted here also are her 4 most important pamphlets that Carroll wrote for the Lincoln administration on the war powers of the presidency and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.

This book may upend much thinking on the war as it seemingly takes us to new places. It just doesn't resift the same facts and myths. The extensive reprinting of primary sources solidifies arguments and makes for great reading of eloquent spokepersons.

Patricia Armstrong

C. Kay Larson is one of the pioneering scholars on the issue of women who served as soldiers and in other capacities during the American Civil War. In this scholarly and thorough treatise, she does justice to a remarkable Maryland woman who played a prominent role in state and national government in the 19th Century, including the Civil War period. This is a meaty biography of an underrated, intellectual, and highly influential woman who interacted with Senators and Presidents.

In this book, John Sowa conveys diverse and effective insights within the field of knowledge representation (KR). The frameworks he employs are deeply grounded philosphically. (Sowa's previous work on conceptual structures reactivated and extended the innovative work of Charles Sanders Peirce integrating logic and graph theory.) The work reviewed here surveys a wide range of KR issues from basic ontology to agency and processes. Chapter 6, Knowledge Soup, is widely recognized for framing and addressing some of the more demanding, and largely unresolved, challenges in the field.

Throughout the book, issues are explored in a coherent, readable way. Of course, KR implies the use of relevant formalisms, and readers with some background in some AI research tradition will be better prepared to absorb the book's insights. However, for students and scholars looking for an integrated overview, Sowa makes a unique contribution.

I thought the first three chapters did an excellent job of covering advances in knowledge representation. However chapter four is marred by an attempt to present what appears to be virtually every syntax used relating to processes. Somewhere in this gulf of complexity I think he has some basic concepts, but they are hard to reach. It's equivalent to reading a book on algorithms in which the author presents the algorithms in C, Cobol, Fortran, Basic, SAS, etc. Why not just present the concepts within the context of a MINIMUM of syntax? Still the book is worth reading and has good appendixes.

This is a great survey book for anyone interested in learning about Maryland's history. It touches on all the major themes in the great state's history and how they related to the national landscape.

Granted the book stops at the dawn of the internet and biotech age and housing boom that has transformed MD's economic and social fabric, it is still the best single volume history of the state availible. Brugger carefully examines the main themes of Maryland's history and ties them all together with the state's penchant for tolerance and moderation. An excellent book for reference or research on the Old Line State/Free State.

This is a "where to sleep, where to eat, where to shop, where to do outdoorsy things" type of guide, with very little dedicated to historical and cultural contexts. You're not going to find nice long essays on the local history and culture (a la Rough Guides) and you're not going to find page after page of glossy color photographs. You will find the state completely covered, but very thinly covered, with an emphasis on outdoor activity (in a very indoor-activity rich state). To be fair to the author, Maryland may be small, but it's so packed with stuff it would be a monumental task to attempt a truly comprehensive guide. Bottom line, this one is more pragmatic than a real culture or history buff will like.

"Maine: An Explorer's Guide" was my first purchase in the series. Since then, I have used "Vermont..." and "Maryland...". While perhaps not ideal for novices in a region, they are excellent for one who has some familiarity with the state one is visiting. The descriptions of history, geography, cultural and recreational offerings; and the listings of inviting, independent restaurants, shops and accommodations have always been accurate, informative and insightful. If you are likely to visit more than once, or stay longer than a few days, this is the book for you. As a piece of advice, buy a good map to go with it.

As a fan of H.L. Mencken--and perhaps one of the few people under thirty who has read "The American Language," "Treatise on the Gods," "Heliogabalus" and all five volumes of "Prejudices"--I am shocked and appalled at the lack of respect paid the great author by his biographer. Mr. Hobson didn't seem to undertake the arduous task of writing a biography on his subject due to a sincere respect or enthusiasm; rather, he seems to have been moved by the less noble motivation of "One-ups-manship"; for as a Baltimorean scribe who happened to be at the right place, at the right time--he was granted access to some of Mencken's hitherto guarded (and now recently released) documents by the executors of Mencken's estate. As a result, Hobson is at times needlessly peevish with his subject, naively judgmental and historically hypocritical. The last remark is born of a nausea grounded in a Politically Correct self-righteousness that the biographer displays when he all but waves his finger at ghosts from the past when, say--for instance--he notices that in a much different world people in the 1910s and 1920s used such racially insensitive phrases for "haggling" as "jewing one down". (SHOULD this be considered offensive? --Certainly.) But for anyone in the modern era who has uttered the phrase "gyped," perhaps eighty years from now some pompous pedant will lodge the ludicrous claim that this shows your hatred of "gypsies" (where in fact the term "gyped" comes from). No, I might hazard the assertion that most people who have used the phrase do not hold an irrational grudge against the Romany people. Rather, they use such phrases unthinkingly--bereft of an racial connotations. My point? --Yes, there were insensitive things about the past. But no more so than in the Present. And to trot out situations and customs--verbal or otherwise--without the benefit of a cultural context betrays both ignorance and malice. Mr. Hobson is shameful in his betrayal of that lowest of critical temptations: To lash out at one's betters. Perhaps if Mr. Hobson thinks that using the term "African American," instead of "black" is a badge of tolerance over and above that of Mencken, maybe he can back up his words with actions: For it was Mencken--not Hobson--who distinguished himself by aiding and promoting writers of the Harlem Renaissance and for his outstanding support of civil rights for both blacks and Jews. Perhaps Mr. Hobson has given as much of himself to the causes of helping others? --If not, then he needs to moderate his disrespectful attitude; for Mencken's actions speak louder than Hobson's words.

Despite some boring passages, Fred Hobson provides a generally interesting and thorough portrait of the original cynic, H.L.Mencken. The book addresses many issues of racism and anti semitism on Mencken's part fairly and openly. The novel is excellently written. I would have preferred more information on the Scope's Trial in relation to Mencken because my interest in Mencken was sparked when reading Inherit the Wind by Laurence and lee in which Mencken is satired as E.K.Hornbeck. Read this book- it is informative and excellent. My congratulations to Fred Hobson and Happy Reading