Theme Parks Books

... because I keep taking it out to look at again. The photographs are stunning. And Graves's prose is just lovely, as it always is. The reason the essays are all too brief (as the previous reviewer noted) is that they originally appeared in "Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine," which set strict limits on length. I read each piece in the series as it came out, but it's lovely to see them all in one place, with more - and very well printed - illustrations.

Meinzer's photography was great but John Graves seemed at a loss for words, i.e. his essays were far too short. Graves takes time to get into his subject ("Goodbye to a River" and "Hardscrabble"). Even though I wanted more, what he wrote is first rate. He understands the magic and individuality of each river, even my Llano.

This is a Summer must read. It's the time of year where people are planning fabulous vacations and are ready to spend some quality time with their children. Theme Parks are a perfect way to spend that time, right? But beware! Danger clearly lurks at every corner and we as consumers are unaware. Mr. Stoneking has proven with his written word that we must look at our surroundings and be smart consumers.

First Superman, now Batman. This book will encourage all of us to take a closer look at this industry and ensure that quality, not quantity rises to the forefront of our priorities.

I was quite taken to open the Dayton City Paper's May 14-20 edition and read on page 24 the following review:

J.T. Ryder
Dayton City Paper
May 14-20, 2008, pg. 24

Jeffrey P. Stoneking's latest book Theme Park Safety Failure$ (AuthorHouse) is a wild ride all on its own. The book not only recounts harrowing tales of safety flaws, but accidental injuries and death sustained through the pervasive trend of theme parks to eschew safety for the sake of the bottom line. He relates account after account of cursory safety inspections, mismanaged parks, ill-trained operators, idiotic thrill seekers, and ill-conceived ride designs. Stoneking, a former employee of Kings Island who also served as a ride operator for the Walt Disney Company, fills the book with his own observations as well. His warnings are not just the alarmist rantings of one individual, but a compilation of well-researched occurrences at theme parks around the world. Get in line, if you dare.
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For anyone planning a vacation to Universal Studios Orlando, this book is a must! With so many guide books on the Orlando attractions, USO gets only a brief mention. So when I found this book, I was thrilled. It covers everything you need to know when planning - when to go, where to stay, where to eat. It lists each attraction and show in great detail. There is a section on each hotel on the property, which is very detailed and very helpful, as well as a section just on City Walk, the entertainment area of USO. Even if you've been to USO in the past, I think this is a great book to keep you up-to-date on the parks and hotels. Very well written by Kelly Monaghan!

This is such a great book if your trip to Orlando is going to feature a trip to the Universal Parks. It is so hard to find a book that has quality input on any park other than Walt Disney World. For the families who are planning to venture beyond that park and into the world of Universal Studios, this guide book is a must. It has exciting descriptions of all of the rides, great input on dining and lodging, and will get you pumped up and ready to go!!

George Millay died on February 6, 2006 but his legacy lives on. Millions have visited Sea World and Wet and Wild. What sparked these two theme parks was George's experiences in the restaurant business. You'll have to read the book to see how he made the leap.

The book describes how George went to various them parks to get ideas, such as the wave generation machine for Wet and Wild.

Sea World was the first to use an ozone purification system. When the Marine Mammal Protection Act was enacted in 1972, Sea World started a captive breeding program to replenish its stock of animals.

George was a visionary and a problem solver; however, even these were not enough. Sometimes he had to depend on luck. On more than one occasion, George came to the brink of financial disaster.

Once I picked up the book, I couldn't put it down. Highly recommended reading even it you're not considering opening a theme park.

This book reveals how he created Sea World, Wet'N Wild and Magic Mountain. What a deal maker and career breaker. It was a wild ride. Hilarious tales of boom, bust and triumph. Read about the peacock's infamous flight. Twists and turns follow George building two aquatic empires. I woke my wife up from laughing so hard while reading it in bed. I couldn't put it down. Get the story from the ultimate insider of amusement parks.

George Millay launched two successful amusement industries almost single-handedly: Marine-life Parks and Water Slide Parks. He seems to have made a bigger splash than Shamu. Millions still are entertained in the wake of his creations: Sea Worlds, Wet `n Wilds and Magic Mountain. Wave Maker is a big splash!

I've lived in Alaska for a long time and I've had the privilege of traveling to the Bristol Bay area and other parts of western Alaska a good number of times. The allure of this area for many is the trophy fishing, but one of the things that any visitor to this area comes away with is a vision of an area whose rare beauty goes beyond the fish that live in the streams, or the animals that stalk the land and that also attract hunters.

In addition, for the photographer, the land of western Alaska poses both opportunities and challenges. The opportunities of course are the many beautiful vistas. The challenges are capturing the spirit of a truly unique landscape.

In this book -- "Wood-Tikchik" and another volume "Rivers of Life", Mr. Ketchum succeeds where in my opinion no one else has in capturing the spirit of the land in the Bristol Bay and western Alaska regions. This is not merely a collection of pictures to grace a coffee table, this is a photographic record of a very unique land.

This is a book that will be treasured. I highly recommend you get a copy. Maybe more than one....it makes a great present.

Wood-Tikchik: Alaska's Largest State Park is an impressive and superbly presented compendium of Robert Glenn Ketchum's magnificent color photography showcasing the pristine natural areas comprising the largest state park in Alaska. A vast, river-laced landscape, Ketchum approached this project with a true artist's eye to visually capture extraordinary photographs of unforgettable Alaska mountain and tundra landscape. Also very highly recommended are Robert Glenn Ketchum's previous master collections of photographic excellence: Rivers of Life: Southwest Alaska, the Last Great Salmon Fishery () and The Tongass: Alaska's Vanishing Rain Forest

Yellowstone To Yukon: Freedom To Roam is a coffee-table photography book that takes the reader along with Florian Schulz on a visual journey of the Northern Rocky Mountain landscape. Two hundred full color images showcase that landscape along with the people, animals, and plants that inhabit it. Enhanced with original thematically appropriate essays by Douglas Chadwick, Karsten Heuer, Ted Kerasote, David Quammen, Rick Bass, and others, Yellowstone To Yukon is a testament to the need for conservation of one of our country's still wild, free, and open places where "bison move across prairies, wolves converge on the hunt, elk bugle across valleys, river otters fish the streams, and grizzlies roam the mountains". Yellowstone To Yukon is a welcome and very highly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library Environmental Studies and Photography collections.

I first heard the phrase "wilderness corridor" when I lived in California's Bay Area in the early 1990s. At that time, the concept was used in conjunction with a bike trail linking the entire Bay Area from Antioch to Oakland. One of the benefits of such a trail, , we were told, would be allowing wildlife to roam freely throughout the suburbs.
I don't recall how that particular issue played out, but the idea was--and is--a good one. Animals don't understand or follow man-drawn boundaries. They roam in territory that most likely has been roamed by their ancestors for thousands of years. Animals are guided by instinct, and man's attempts to limit them to national parks and protected areas is doomed to failure.
And so the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, was born. In her Publisher's Notes, Helen Cherullo explains the concept as a "dream of a small group of biologists and conservationists--to link the existing parks in the United States and Canada with connected corridors into one intact ecosystem," stretching from Yellowstone National Park, along the Rocky Mountains and through the Yukon. It is 460,000 square miles of untouched land--the last undisturbed parcel of land in the two countries, according to Cherullo, extending 1,990 miles from Cokeville, Wyo., to the Arctic Circle.
This area of land, the Y2Y Ecoregion, is the home of grizzlies, 118 fish species, 10,000 golden eagles and hundreds of bald eagles, to mention but a few of its inhabitants. It is the traditional land of 31 indigenous Native or First Nation (in Canada) peoples, who have inhabited the area for more than 10,500 years. Less than 3 million people occupy the land at this time, but that is changing rapidly.
Florian Schulz, a photojournalist who has long championed conservation, tells the reader that the United States and Canada are making the same mistakes his native Europe did--all of that continent's "true wilderness" is gone, cut down for human use and cleared to develop man's idea of civilization. It's a mistake, Schulz says, that should not be repeated.
So he rounded up some of the world's most noted scientists: geneticist David Suzuki, wildlife biologist Douglas H. Chadwick, and biologist Karsten Heuer, as well as authors and journalists, to document the vast resources, the wildlife and the dangers of approaching development. Interspersed with stunning photography and Schulz's observations, this oversize art book is both visually stunning and a good read.
While obviously a conservation treatise, the book is so filled with magnificent anecdotes, facts, scientific studies and theories, as well as marvelous pictures of Nature and her children in all their glory, that one cannot just plop it on the coffee table and forget it, as we do with most "art" books. This one begs to be read, to be perused carefully. The photos call for our attention and admiration, the stories and concerns of the writers compel us to pay attention and take a stand.
The current practice of isolating specific areas as "nature preserves," according to biologists Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson, actually contributes to extinction. In a book they published more than 40 years ago, they proved that "islands" of nature--small areas kept separate from other small areas--leads to insularity, which is detrimental to biodiversity and ecological health. Small "islands" harbor fewer species and fewer individuals of those species, and these small populations are more vulnerable to climate change, drought, inbreeding and food supply failure.
David Quammen, noted conservation journalist, points out the problems with bear management in the Lower 48 as an example of insularity leading to extinction.
This concept was one of the precursors to the Y2Y concept.
There's not room in this column to summarize the book--it's something you have to read, more than once, to fully digest. The overall idea of connectedness and attachment to nature is captured eloquently by Suzuki in the Foreword.
"For most of our 10,000-year existence, our species, Homo sapiens, lived in an intimate relationship with the natural world. ... predictable regularities were collected into a worldview, the sum of all observations, insights and speculations, in which everything, including the past, present and future, was part of a seamless whole. ... In such a world of elaborate interconnection, people understood that everything they did had consequences and therefore every deliberate act was laden with responsibility."
The words of all the contributors are as eloquent, as passionate, and as though-provoking.
But it is Schulz's photographs that catch the reader, mesmerizing us with the vision of mountains and lakes and rivers and animals. Schulz captures not only the images hew ants us to see, but imbues them with life: a grizzly eating a root, so close we can smell its breath; logging activities in British Columbia almost cause us to sneezed from the dust thrown up; the purple majesty of Mt. McKinley at dawn causes us to stop breathing for the sheer wonder of the beauty.
We humans are visual animals, so we will remember the images long after we've forgotten the text. But the views of this pristine land and its denizens should stay with us forever, and hopefully, we will embrace the Y2Y concept so we can see the actual places Schulz has immortalized in person, rather than as faded memories in dusty books, years after the original has been destroyed.
Readers interested in learning more about the Y2Y Conservation Initiative can visit www.y2y.net for information. Florian Schulz's images can be seen at www.visionsofthewild.com.

One of the best places on earth photographed by the best in the business. These stunning pictures will take your breath away. One sometimes wishes for larger pictures.

One might wish for a larger format, but clearly every effort was made to reproduce the depth, detail and textures that make much of Ansel Adams' photography worth viewing again and again. Many famous images of his most beloved source of inspiration are included here, which makes this handsome, economical edition a good introduction to his work.

An excellent treatment of this period in Yosemite's history. Fun to read, gives detailed information, is indexed, and the sources are sited! Photos are well done and informative. Students at the fourth and fifth grade level can read and understand the text.

Loved most of the book. I loved how Mr. Johnston writes that the first people of Yosemite were Paiutes, but then writes they became Miwoks, then back again to Paiutes? If the first Indian people of Yosemite were war like Paiutes, then it turned to peace-loving Miwoks, then back to war like Paiutes it is kinda odd? Maybe because they were always Paiutes. The Yosemite National Park Service has been trying to pass off the story that Paiutes and Miwoks were friendly with each other. That was false. In fact the Miwoks were scared of the Mono Paiutes and were the ones who named the Ahwahnees "Yosemites" which in their language Yosemite meant "The Killers". The Miwoks were afraid of them and never entered Yosemite Valley until after the death of Chief Tenaya when they went to work for whites in the park. Hank Johnston has a photo of a Native American chief he and the Yosemite National Park Service don't recognize in his book. Under his photo it has something like "Unknown Historic Chief of Yosemite". That man was Yosemite-Mono Lake Indian Chief Captain John of Poko-Tucket. Yet the Yosemite National Park Service never knew that the historic chief after Chief Tenaya was a Paiute chief? People interested in reading the real history of the Native Americans of Yosemite should also read Lafayette Bunnell's book about the Yosemite War. He was one of the two men to meet and write about Chief Tenaya and wrote that Chief Tenaya was the founder of the Paiute Colony of Ahwahnee and that he spoke Paiute, not Miwuk. In fact there is not ONE mention of the word Miwuk, Mewo or Miwok in the whole book. Yet there are many, many mentions of the Mono Paiute people throughout the book as being the primary group of Chief Tenaya's band of Inidans. The other person wrote that Chief Bautista of the Miwoks called the Ahwahneechees or Yosemite Native American Indian people the "Monahs". Which is another word for Mono Paiute. So in conclusion the Native Americans of Yosemite were Paiutes. The Indian people who roamed Yosemite. This is a good book, but needs improvement. Great photo of Native American Yosemite Indian chief CAPTAIN JOHN OF THE YOSEMITE-MONO LAKE PAIUTES.

Gary Randolf has done a remarkable job of splicing natural history, Americans and psychical beauty into one great book. Traveling through time and seasons, the reader feels the words and witnesses the beauty of the Adirondack mountains. It's not just full of incredible landscape shots (both subtle and grand) but is matched with a moving narrative that warns us this island paradise will always be in danger.

Time for the world to take heed, especially in a period of history when our government seems to feel that acid rain is so irreversible here, that we can actually lower emissions standards? That the damage is already done? It's not too late, and Mr. Randorf reminds us with every page.

This is a FANTASTIC collection of photographs by a real artist. The East Bay Regional Park District lands (Alameda & Contra Costa Counties in CA) are one of a kind jewels to be enjoyed. Thanks to some visionaries these parks, trails and open spaces have been preserved for humankind.