Roads and Highways Books

i got this book for my ex-boyfriend (before we broke up). he's a country boy and he loved this book.

I purchased this book for my son, who drives alot as a pizza delivery guy. I don't recall the price, but it is a very thin book, and not worth whatever I paid. it is funny though, and an unusual subject....

"This is a book about animals that, like the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz, are not just merely dead but really most sincerely dead. These are animals in which even flies have lost interest." So begins the introduction to one of the most unusual wildlife guides ever written.
The many Rorschach-like, black ink illustrations provide key clues to identifying creatures that, unlike the fabled chicken, failed to make it to the other side of the road. "The toad's tendency to flatten itself against the ground when threatened or afraid produces a uniform road pattern. The illustration is drawn from an actual specimen (male). Females are somewhat larger." "This illustration was drawn from and dead road runner, and is included to show something of the serenity achieved by a few road animals. The frantic pace of constant food-seeking has slowed considerable here. Regardless of traffic speed, the bird is clearly at rest."
Flattened Fauna is not a politically incorrect nor frivolous book. This is a legitimate guidebook based upon years of research by the author, who teaches biology at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. It has statistics: "Various historical estimates place the density of flattened animals at from 0.429 to 4.10 animals per mile of prime highway habitat." History: "A reliable 1897 report from North Dakota gives evidence of at least one large snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) flattened under the steel-rimmed wheels of several loaded wagons." And, of course, environmental: "Road carrion is among the major reasons why flesh-eating animals become part of the flattened fauna. Ground squirrels nibble on bats, opossums on ground squirrels, and skunks on opossums, providing a fine two-dimensional example of the balance of nature."
The various chapters identify numerous species and habits of reptiles, amphibians, birds, and small mammals. Unlike other guidebooks that focus on habitats where animals live, Roger Knutson takes a different perspective: the habitat where they died. He's not the first to do so, but his humor raises this study out of the dusty bins of academia to make this little book (5 x 8 inches and 80 pages) one that you'll read from cover to cover.

Life in suburbia is grand. When my daughter was 4, my wife ran over a squirrel and started crying over is as my daughter said, "He must have been in an awful hurry to see his family." Although I'm fortunate enough to live close enough to protected open space for our street to play host to a family or two of deer, road kill is about the closest I come to seeing anything beyond a momentary "Something wild ran by," so this comes in handy. There's a lot of raodkill in various shapes, and after three days, about the only way you're going to be able to figure out what it once was is this guide.

This is a wonderful book for many reasons. The slam on the snob journals, where they list the camera used (the author studiously lists the photocopier that best took the image) is one of my favorites. True, death isn't funny (or pretty), but hey, it is a jungle out there. If you are kind of a weenie, and can't bear to think of Bambi and Thumper buying it on the freeway, this is not the book for you. But with a title like "Flattened Fauna", why on earth would you consider buying it?

This book is a gem in terms of dark humor. If that's your thing, you will enjoy it very much. If you think the world is full of sweet, adorable little animals bucking up on hind legs, talking in helium-altered baby voices, find a more suitable book, possibly in the children's section.

This book will help answer questions you might have about
about survey stakes ane plan reading. I reccommended to every operator outthere.

Like one of the other reviewers I am a homeowner/handyman I was hoping to find a book on the proper way to grade, dig, etc...

This book is for the civil engineer, or project manager. It gives a good overall idea on the general concepts on how to do things related to grading/excavation. However, this book will not give you enough knowledge to do a project without additional experiences/references.

If you were a contractor who was getting ready to start a new job and needed to gain some general knowledge on a type of job you do not normally work, this book would be a good starting point.

If you are not a contractor, unless you are about to start a REALLY BIG job, with multiple pieces of large equipment, this book is of the wrong scope for you.

The only book of any kind that I have ever returned. Appears to have been written in the 60's. Revision must have been just to update the copyright date. A complete waste of my time!

A great book for those who are new to site work on construction sites. Some things are outdated, esp. pictures, but it is a must have. Look for a survey 101 book as well.

This is a book written for apprentice operating engineers. As such, it teaches the basics of road survey, grading, compaction, pipe laying, stakeout, drainage. It goes into detail on how to read survey stakes, mark and read witness lath, calculate differences in height, read and use a hand level, stake slopes, layout a subdivison, find the bottom elevation of pipelines, proper compaction of road base, and just about anything else a road worker could think of. This is an easy to use paperback book with many drawings which help explain the text. I can't tell you how useful this book has been to me.For those readers that are involved with excavation, survey, inspection (me), contracting, this book IS MUST HAVE.

This book was not professionally written, had some material that made the author look defensive about her nursing practice....Really could have been polished up a lot more before publication. Epstein also rates her own books at a 5 star for both editions!!!! Get Shalon Kearney's book instead, it may be outdated, but it was much more useful to me in the long run!!

A must read! Any and all nurses even thinking about traveling should read this very helpful book.

I realize this book is 2 years old as of this writing, but I was sorely disappointed that even so it cited references from 2000 - 2002 as "current". Also it is chock full of typos and sorely in need of a good editor. I honestly didn't read anything of value in this book that I didn't ALREADY get off her website (verbatim, in most cases). Don't waste your money or time.

This is a must have book for nurses that are wanting to discover the adventures and advantages of Healthcare Traveling. This book is written from a personal experience in travel nursing. To A Nurse, by a Nurse... This would also make a great gift for a new graduate nurse.

As a long-time travel nurse, I read this book for kicks. I found the information to be so poor, that I cannot recommend it at all, especially to the new traveler. A new traveler or wannabe traveler will be led down astray. Worse, important information is sadly missing and misinformation is all through it. It's too bad.

In the Base-Superstructure debate that has been raging for a while, and still is, within modern Marxism, GA Cohen's Defense of Karl Marx's Theory of History is one of the more powerful blows struck and deserves to be read.

Cohen is a supporter of "the primary of productive forces" (the word primacy here being used to avoid the label of being a determinist or vulgar marxist) and argues to uphold the base-superstructure metaphor which Marx set forth in the 1859 preface to the Contribution to Political Economy. In a nutshell, the metaphor basically said that the base of all society is the economic structure, where everything else (legal and political institutions, for example) rise as a superstructure on this base. The implication is that the most influential thing in society is indeed our economic system. The further implication here, and surely what Marx was trying to say, is that capitalism is the defining aspect of everything and essentially the primarily determining entity in society.

GA Cohen upholds this metaphor by first scouring the 1859 preface, then other Marx works and finally arguing for the legitimacy of the "primary of productive forces" himself. His arguments are concise and powerful. If you are a serious student of Marxism, the read is basically mandatory and helps break the illusion that there is really one theory of Marxism and thats it. Cohen's interpertation of Marx tends to be the one that most people identify Marx with themselves and also tends to paint Marxism as cold and determinist (despite his attempts to keep away from the dreaded title).

However, if you are going to read this, be sure to read Althusser, Williams and Lukacs. These are the other three major points on the debate and reading them will give you a rounded perspective on the entire thing. I tend not to agree with Cohen (though that doesn't show in my rating) and think that if you read a lot of Marx, you can see he himself differing from Cohen. The famous 11th statement in his Thesis of Feurbach sums it all up:

"The philosophers have only interperted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Cohen's views on the economic base's primacy doesn't leave much room for this statement to be anything other than a hollow statement.

Cohen's classic book is a defense of the Second International thesis that the productive forces (roughly technology and labor power) are the "motive forces" of history. In the first version of the book this idea, widely disputed among Marxists, was intended to show that socialism was the necessary culmination of a history of increasing development of the productive forces. This is a difficult thesis to maintain today, and indeed in more recent work, some of which is embodied in the second edition of the book, Cohen retracts it, suggesting only that the development of the productive forces makes socialism possible. (Subsequently he seems to have backpedaled even on this.) The implications of the weakening of historical materialism (along with a sharp critique of Cohen's original view, one that he now largely accepts) were offered by Wright, Levine, and Sober in their Reconstructing Marxism, an essential companion piece to Cohen's book. They essentially involve taking apart the optimistic claims that Marxism offers an integrated scientifically based program of social change that inspires optimism about progress towards socialism. Cohen's main thesis, as an interpretation of Marx and as a _defense_ of Marx, seems much less plausible than, for example, the alternative "class struggle" interpretations of historical materialism urged, for example, by Robert Brenner or (formerly) Richard Miller in his Analyzing Marx.

Nonetheless, Cohen's book remains a model of clarity, depth, and ruthlessly honest exposition that shows up the places where it runs into problems. It contains must that is salvageable, not least an interpretation of what it is for the economic to be "primary" in terms of a theory of functional explanation, on which the ideological superstructure and the state are explained in part in terms of their functionality for the economic base, and revolutionary social change due to "fettering" of the productive forces understood in terms of dysfunctionality. People who like their Marx fuzzy and obscure enough to avoid intelligible criticism (Althusserians, for example) have never liked this book, but if Marxism _as a theory_ has a future in the wake of collapse of the Marxism _as a movement_, Cohen here set the standard for what that theory should look like in procedure and rigor if not necessarily in its substanative claims. Serious study of Marx's theory of history starts here.

This book has some virtues, in terms of clarity of exposition, but as a reading of Marx it leaves a lot to be desired. Like Jon Elster's attempts of making (non)sense of Marx that followed it, this text reads into Marx a set of assumptions taken for granted within neoclassical economics but entirely foreign to Marx's work. If you want to see how Marx and Marxism measure up to the unquestionable and seemingly unthinkable criteria of bourgeois thought, read this. But if you want to understand Marx, read Althusser. 'For Marx' is a good place to start, but be sure to read the essays collected in 'The Humanist Controversy' and 'Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists' too, not to mention 'Reading Capital' and 'Machiavelli and Us' ... Cohen may be easier to read, but only because Cohen doesn't challenge any of the ideology of capitalism that is as invisible to most people as water is to the fish that swim in it.

I loved the information shared in this book. Yes, I admit I do look out the window as I'm driving and try to "figure out what that is." Such is the excitement of my life. This guidebook addresses a lot of the things I was clueless about and confirmed many of the others that I thought I knew.

Too bad that the book isn't more comprehensive. Some of the items discussed seemed to have been picked arbitrarily while some others have been ommitted.

Technology is everywhere in the man-made world and this little field guide should have been a useful item to have in the outdoors, it even has rounded corner pages so they won't get dog-eared when you stuff the book into the pocket of your LL Bean Penobscot Parka. Plenty of information, too, with each item nicely divided into five sections: Behaviour, Habitat, How it works, Unique characteristics and Interesting facts but I was disappointed with the book because one of the key elements, the photos, are really inadequate.

A clue to this is the front and back cover with nine color photos that are repeated inside but in black and white where they just look dull and grey. Printed in a fairly coarse screen doesn't help either. Also many of them are plainly too small even though there is plenty of page space. The choice of objects seems rather arbitrary also: page thirty-four describes a car exhaust plume, page seventy-one a storm drain cover or a gas station pump on page 114. Strangely airports get only these objects: VOR station, De-icing boot, Pitot tube, Vortex generator and Ground power unit. What happened to runway markers and approach lights or airport beacons, wind socks, localizer antennas for cockpit landing systems for instance?

The subject matter is such that there are few book dealing with technology in this way and Ed Sobey's attempt does invite comparison with Brian Hayes quite stunning Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape. This a is a large beautifully printed book with every photo in color, all with detailed captions, plenty of sidebars and it's very comprehensive. There is not too much to do with the look of technology that is not in Hayes book.

This little book is best suited for a casual, recreational read. When you are wondering about the various electronic and electromechanical gadgets seen by the roadside. Some might be on posts, while others might be perched on tops of buildings.

Sobey explains in non-technical terms what those devices do. Like the various forms that satellite dishes can take. Or, say, cellphone towers. So many of us use cellphones these days, but pay little attention to the infrastructure needed to make them work.

A short pamphlet. Although colorful, much of the information can be retrieved on the websites for Maui without cost.

Concise, easy to use, fairly accurate. Milepost suggestions were good. Mileage was off by 0.1 -0.5 miles at times. Worth $5 - 10 if you don't plan on spending all day at either venue.

We purchased this guide as one of many for planning our trip to Maui earlier this year. This guide was very detailed on the Haleakala portion and decent enough for the Road to Hana, pointing out many of the highlights of the trip. The photography in the guide was outstanding, the colors very brilliant - just wish they'd have put more photos on specific places than random shots from around Maui. Many of the graphics were also a nice touch, especially for Haleakala.

Apparently the author used to work for HVNP, so he knows his stuff and does a good job detailing the geology of the volcano, if you're into that sort of thing - we like history. This guide is worth the few bucks to add it to your travel collection.

A delightful little book showing mostly native wildlife and scenics, as well as people and sights and signs along the Alaska Highway. Almost all the photographs have captions that tell the locations along the highway where they were taken, and the text gives an entertaining general narrative describing the highway from start to finish.

This is not a travel or wildlife field guide, but an inspiring pictorial book for a photographer or nature lover, showing and describing areas where many of the wild animals and interesting sights may be found. Erwin and Peggy Bauer, who both passed away this past year, were outstanding partners in a wildlife photography career spanning many many years.

I plan to travel the Alaska Highway this summer by RV and definitely will be taking this little book with me.

The description of this book indicates it is hardcover. It IS NOT a hardcover book. It's also very small. There are a lot of good pictures, but little writing. If you are looking for a nice hardcover book with lots of details - this is not it.

The authors provide a view of the Alaska Highway as it is in this century, not the previous century. The Alaska Highway of this century is not the dusty, gravel road of the previous century. This book allows the reader to formulate expectations of an Alaskan Highway journey in 2003. The authors also provide information on likely places to spot caribou, bison, muskoxen, and wolves. Their photographs capture wildlife, scenery, relaxing side trips, local humor, and glimpses into the past in a vibrant, brillant, informative, and tantalizing manner. The text is refreshing. I'm glad I bought this book and I would recommend it to others. For those planning to travel the Alaska Highway in the near future, this book is a great supplement to the 55th Anniversary (2003) edition of The Milepost.

I was rather disappointed when I finally received this book. The cover is a perfect example of my problem with the book. Take notice of the subtitle, "A Portrait of the Ultimate Road Trip". Now notice the picture of the highway to the left, and a seperate picture of a brown bear to the right. For a book about something as visually exciting as the Alaska Highway and it's surroundings, I counted only 3 pictures that actually included beautiful scenery with the actual Alaska Highway. No pictures of wildlife and the highway. How about a picture of a brown bear crossing the road or a beautiful sunset blanketing the highway with golden rays of sunlight. If that is what you expected, you won't find it here.
In several instances the words describe how often one will encounter bison heards, grizzly bears, caribou, and moose crossing the highway, but not once is there an image of any of these creatures near anything remotely resembling asphalt. There are great pictures of these animals by themselves, but they could be stock photography from who know's where. The author's describe a mountain range coming into view as a beautiful backdrop to the Alaska Highway, so then why do they not show me a picture of the highway backdropped by this awesome mountian range? Instead they show me a picture of a lynx!?
Maybe my expectations of this book were too literal, and I expected too much from it. I mean I love dogs, but when I buy a book on the Alaska Highway I want to see it, not close ups of people's cute dogs. I counted 5 dog pictures, compared to the 3 pictures of the actual Alaska Highway. I think this book should be renamed; "The Alaska Highway and the Dogs That Live Off to the Side".
I must say that this book did make me more interested in the Alaska Highway, but not for anything it did, but for what it didn't do. It described the most beautiful images, but left your imagination to paint the picture. Disappointing.....unless you like dogs.

I really enjoyed this book. The stories are all so touching in one way or another. It is difficult to believe that so many people have been disrupted so that you and I can enjoy better and safer highways. I don't think that I will ever drive along a super highway without thinking or wondering just who lived there and what efforts and sacrifices were made. Not only did the author take us on a ride of clearing the path for our convenience, but he also added a personal touch by letting us in on his personal life. Good story.

I was so disappointed with this book. I hoped to gain some useful knowledge about eminent domain, as my home is in jeopardy. Instead, I found a very personal tale, filled with with onformation about the biths of his three children and the most outlandish condemnation cases. In one, he told about cockroaches crawling all over the property owner. In 2 more he told tales of human waste being discovered on the premises. In the rest he mostly told how having a beer or a chaw of chewing tobacco with the property owners changed the previously hostile people to those who accepted his first offer for the property. Though the tales of spiderwebs hanging over beds, and cockroaches, and human waste and other tales of the filthiest properties he accquired seems to be the gist. Only for other right of way men.

After reading this book, I gained a new perspective on super-highways and Right-of-Way. There are many families and lives disrupted so that we can have better roadways, and it is comforting to know that James Broadbent, and others like him, are out there to help people during these trying times. It was a treat to take a glimpse into Mr. Broadbent's life and the lives of the people who were affected by the new highway. "Right of Way Man" is a well written book that will leave you with a new appreciation for Right-of-Way negotiators.

When I purchased this book I thought it would be an interesting topic. However, I soon found out how wrong I was. This book focuses on the author's personal life more than America's highways. I did not purchase this book to read about teenage kids and their pets. This book should be listed under fiction. These stories are far fetched. It seems like the author was more intent in getting this book published then putting some quality into his work.

I have been four wheeling for 15 years, and this has to be the worst book I have ever read on the subject. The techniques described in this book should not be attempted by anyone, even the most experienced! This off-road manual depicts very dangerous recovery techniques, driving habits, and more. For example, there is a picture with a man operating a winch while standing two feet away from the cable that is under heavy tension(!), and the caption warns not to let your hands get close to the drum! Overall, I was very disappointed in this manuscript!

Ever wonder what all those roof racks, off-road lights, and brush guards were really intended for? The answer to that and a whole lot more are in this wonderful reference by Nick Dimbleby.

"The book is fully illustrated with diagrams and a excellent selection of photographs showing all manner of vehicles in a variety of exotic and not so exotic locations."

With the recent American craze for SUV vehicles, it's about time we Yanks actually learn how to use them !

sport

I bought this because I am planning a long weekend in Sedona, after flying into Phoenix and picking up a rental car. It's no better than a map I would expect to get for free from the car rental agency, but it's laminated. Really I bought this because I had already place 3 Sedona books in my Shopping Cart and needed a fourth item to qualify for the 4-for-3 special from Amazon, so essentially this map was free. For that price, I guess it's worth the money.