Nevada Books

Thomas guide books used to come with the material on a cd. Now that cd is not available.They need to include the cd or make it available either by purchase
or included with the guide.

If you are interested in Nevada mining boom towns and ghost towns, a visit to Tonopah should be in your future, and this short, illustrated book would make for good reading beforehand. The text is drawn from the much larger A History of Tonopah Nevada book, but the photos are new, provided by the Central Nevada Museum or from various private collections.

Although the first chapter, on the pre-history of the area (think 10,000 BC to 1,000 BC) is probably not necessary to understanding what went on here between 1900 and the present, the rest of the book is much to the subject, discussing the foundation of the city, miners and their business practices, mining specialties, the companies, the silicosis, the role of women, the social organizations both high and low, as well as the petering out of the mines and the arrival of the government in the form of the air force base and then the nuclear tests. Written in 1990, it does not address the last 17 years of decay and the sad collapse of Tonopah since then.

The photos are uniformly excellent, and give a vivid portrait of the lives of honest frontier folk.

Well worth reading.

The author relies on Austin's newspaper (no longer in print) called the Reese River Reveille to describe what every day life in Austin was like, from its founding in the 1860s to about the 1950s. Most of the book focuses on the 1860s, when Austin was founded as a mining town. The book then discusses its growth and development, the struggles of its inhabitants in an isolated location, and the hopes for Austin's own "place in the sun" as a premier western town.

The book is easy to read and very enjoyable. Having spent about a month in Austin this summer, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book in my college's library. Recommended for anyone interested in frontier history.

The giant Great Basin Desert was covered by Great Lakes sized bodies of fresh water 10 000 years ago. Today it is dry and salty dotted with salty inland seas and isolated mountain ranges teeming with biodiversity.

This book is a journey through old Lake Bonneville and Lake Lahonatan to today's Lake Tahoe, Mono Lake, Great Salt Lake, and Pyramid Lake. Along the way we meet the Humboldt River and mountains of the Great Basin. A truly great read for natural history buffs and those fascinated by America's least known desert.

Great for the occasional hiker strolling thru the woods and wondering, "i wonder what kind of tree that is"? good illustrations esp. illustrations of bark(which are usually hard to draw). spend a couple of bucks, it will make you hike a whole lot more interesting.....

Warfighters takes the reader into the USAF Weapons School to learn how the air force teaches its pilots to be at the top of thier profession. The book contains beautiful color photographs of the most high-tech military aircraft in action. The book gives a comprehensive history of the fighter and bomber aircraft of the the USAF. The Red Flag school is shown in good detail as are the adversary aircraft flown against students to teach them how to fight the latest soviet made fighters.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the English language. The writing is amusing and flows well. It is informative and entertaining. If you don't buy it at least check it out at the library.

Here are a few sentences from a short article that appeared Nov 21, 2004 in the Washington (DC) Post BOOKWORLD. It was this article that made me interested in this book.

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In the 1950s Walter Van Tilburg Clark seemed on his way to becoming a major American writer, both a popular and a critical success. His first and third novels, "The Ox-Bow Incident" and "The Track of the Cat", were made into movies. And one of his short stories, "The Wind and the Snow of Winter," an elegy for freewheeling days on the Western frontier that still has few equals, was an immediate classic. ... Today Clark, who died in 1971, is at least in print: all three novels, along with "The Watchful Gods and Other Stories", the collection in which "The Wind and the Snow of Winter" appears. But he has become an in-crowd kind of writer, championed by a Stendhalian happy few, such as Wallace Stegner, and otherwise getting little attention.

The author had the advantage of actually meeting people who had had direct dealings with Siegel -- they are probably all gone by now, I am sure.

So, we find that this account provides almost all the information that we have available about the man. The work is seminal in the sense that later books almost all use it as a source; true or not, you will gain little additional knowledge from other sources.

The book contains some interesting photos. The house in which he was killed in 1947 is still there in Beverly Hills, and looks the same.

Life in the Old West was perilous and uncertain. There were fortunes to be made in the gold fields and in the enterprises that followed the gold rush. Yet law enforcement was not well-established, and stagecoach and train robbers could wipe out a fortune as quickly as it was made. The Wells, Fargo Company needed a way to protect the great sums of money its coaches were responsible for delivering. It hired James B. Hume, a California lawman, to take charge of its detective bureau in 1873.

James Hume was a different breed from the stereotypical western lawman who winked at civil rights and abused authority. He was just as concerned that an innocent man be kept out of jail as he was that he find the guilty man. And he had an impressive record of catching the guilty man, the most famous being Black Bart, the "Po8" stage coach robber.

Pioneering methods of criminal investigation which are now used widely, James Hume dug pellets out of a dead stage horse in order to do a ballistics test, and he tracked down Black Bart with the laundry mark from his handkerchief. Determined but patient, he logged an impressive number of solved cases.

This biography by Richard Dillon reads as smoothly as a novel. He used James Hume's own letters and diaries, which are in the Wells, Fargo Museum in San Francisco, for his research as very little had been written about Hume's life. He not only relates the fascinating events of Hume's public life but mines his personality as well and finds a heroic and likable figure.

In a time when we could use more heroes, I enjoyed reading about a real-life hero who contributed to the colorful past of the West and still maintained his integrity.