Hoffman Books

This book is delightful presented as well as informative due to the very artistic and funny bone tickling illustrations. The author is obviously writing about something he has done many times and holds especially dear to his heart. There are two "loves" in this book - the rewarding pleasure of canine companionship enhancing the awesome grandeur of outdoor experience. A joy to read!

This book helped me so much the last time I went camping. I was always so scared to bring my dog with me...too many variables. My friend told me about this book and that it might help. It told me everything I really needed to know in a simplistic way. Gary Hoffman didn't make me feel any less intelligent for my lack of knowledge about camping with my dog. I got all the information I needed and the trip was a success. Next time I just might stay longer!

Gary Hoffman's book, Hiking With Your Dog, is extremely helpful when backpacking with the family dogs. I consider myself a well informed person, but having information available in print is invaluable. It's not always easy to keep your facts straight while dogs bark, children yell and husbands fish. I would have liked even more information. I'm not concerned about typos. Content presented in a concise and simple manner, to me, means the difference between a wonderful camping trip and a disaster.

This is the first "Dog hiking"-book I've seen that has something for the more difficult situations. The book has even short chapter about things like fording and bouldering. It still has the basics too.

No photos, just drawn pictures. Not very informational ones, except the ones about first aid.

Good book, but a bit short. Especially if you do longer, overnight hikes in difficult terrain. LaBelle's book "Guide to backpacking with your dog" is definetly better if you do shorter walks that last only a day. If you decide to buy it, avoid 1st edition. The 2nd edition is definetly improved version.

This is a very disappointing book. Almost anyone with dog experience and an 8th grade education could do a better job. The author states in his foreword that he makes no apologies for spelling or grammar mistakes. No excuse! There are errors of punctuation, grammar, and spelling throughout. This might be excusable if the information were of any help, but it's not. About 80% of the information is self-evident, 19% is speculative personal opinion, and only 1% is anything I was unaware of (and I'm not exactly a dog expert). The number of pages is misleading, as there are many blank pages or pages with almost no text, silly cartoons, or big type. The material could fit into about 20 pages of double-spaced text.

Don't waste your money on this book! I recommend Charlene Bell's book instead.

This is a terrific book that helps us understand the energy behind Mark Twain's genius. Hoffman shows a profound respect for his subject, but doesn't shy away from painting a full portrait of the man behind the icon. If you're looking for a glossy love letter to Twain, read something else. But if you really want to understand how a scrappy young kid grows up to be a world-renowned talent, this is a great place to start.

This book is captivating from cover to cover. I highly recomend it not only for the subject matter but also for serious students of social history of the 19th Century. The author really did his research.

Hoffman offers an excellent, readable life of America's greatest writer. In its pages, Hoffman reveals the tragedy of Clemens' life; the family problems, the death of his brother, and the loss of his children. With this Hoffman shows a man living a life of great pain and sadness, one who faced a seemingly neverending series of personal crises.

Yet this is also the life of a great humorist, and Hoffman shows the reader the man who created Mark Twain, both Clemens' great savior and his unending curse. Hoffman does a great job of showing the links between Clemens' life and the works of Twain, how the pain and tragedy could produce some of the greatest literature in the English language. Though suffering somewhat from scholastic voguishness (his suggestion of Clemens' possible homosexual relationship in Nevada is rather strained), this is definitely a book that people should read to understand both a great American writer and a great American.

Andrew Hoffman is to Mark Twain what Albert Goldman was to Lenny Bruce, John Lennon and Elvis Presley-- which is to say a parasitical graverobber who projects his own weirdness onto his subject.

There are way too many legitimate biographies of Clemens for this book to be taken seriously.

Q: If you are writing a biography of a famous author, using recycled material, what can you add to make it sell anyway? A: Claim that the author was gay! (Some people say that you could add insight, but Mr. Hoffman disagrees). Hoffman bases his assumption of homosexuality on the following "evidence": 1. Mark Twain had very close male friends. 2. Mark Twain lived with his male friends. 3. Mark Twain went on road trips with his male friends. (Fraternity brothers beware, Hoffman is coming after you next!) This is just another example of people who don't want to do their research. I'm sure Hoffman looked a lot at the life of Samuel Clemens, but it seems he didn't do his background material. Many, many people from this era are assumed gay because of the extremely affectionate letters they wrote to their same-sex friends. Guess what? That's just the way they wrote. There are better biographies out there, and they're not too hard to find.

This a good corporate tax book, and I'm not saying that just because my professor (Raabe) helped write it. It is a very comprehensive look at partnerships, corporate, estate, and trust taxes. For anyone who plans on being a tax professional (CPA or adviser, not just someone doing taxes 101) then this is a great book and discusses all the issues. No it does not teach you how to prepare a form and it shouldn't. That is not being a professional. That is being a monkey. It teaches you how to think about the tax issues in a logical way. Learning how to fill out a tax form is done as a staff one in a big four firm. This class helps you once you are past that point and assists in actually helping your clients reduce their corporate taxes. Which is what is important and makes the money. As Raabe says, if you're not helping your client pay as little taxes as possible then you're not doing your job. There is a reason why corporations only pay 9% of the taxes the government handles despite the fact they make billions of dollars.

It is a very good book.

I received my book in a timely matter and it is in the condition as stated in the description.

i received the book much before that I expected Thank you very much

Maria

Okay so we're reading a book on TAXES people. This is not the latest and greatest thriller or murder mystery where you expect to be entertained. In fact, if you expected to be entertained by this book, then (a) you are way out of whack with reality or (2) you actually love tax related information. Basically put, this book is what it is, namely, a fairly comprehensive guide to the taxation of partnerships, estates and trusts. This is by no means a 'taxes for idiots' book where it shows the reader how to write some number on line 12 of some tax form and, if that's what you wanted or were looking for, then maybe you need the aforementioned idiots guide to taxes. Now if your in the trust business, a financial planner, a CPA or in some other industry that deals with taxes on a regular basis and your looking to gain some insight into recent developments as well as the specifics of taxes as described in the title, then this book will be helpful and I guarantee it will not spend a lot of time collecting dust on your bookshelf. Well at least not until the 2010 version. Enjoy!!

This is by far the worst tax book I have seen. I had to endure this book in a corporate tax course at CMU. This book will leave you clueless on how to actually prepare a tax form. I received an "A" in the course but the book should get an "F". Instructors should care about their students and not on the kickback that they get from the publishers. If you have to use this book - Good luck.

To be quite honest, don't buy this.
Looking at the back, it leads you to believe that it's don't some fantastic scary story book.. And it's not. So unless you like stories that actually sound completely ridiculous, waste the thirteen dollars and the hour i spent trying to make the book interesting.
GOOD LUCK.

A super collection of scary ghost stories from down South. There are famous haunts like the Bell Witch from Tennessee, Blackbeard's ghost who roams Ocracoke Inlet in North Carolina, and the Army of the Dead in Charleston. There are also some not-so-famous but equally scary tales like the Wampus Cat, Hold Him Tabb, and the Devil's Mansion. These are great stories to tell around the campfire!

Another thing I liked about the book was the way the author threaded humorous moments into many of the stories. I laughed aloud when I read I'm Coming Down and Wait Until Emmet Comes.

The book has lovely illustrations that go with each story, and a map showing the towns and locations from which the tales originated.

Can't wait to see more books from this author.

This is good for storytelling, but as for the story, I've heard a lot of these, researched some (the Bell Witch) and the stories in this book are recreations. I'm only giving 2 stars due to that there was a lot of good research, but a lot of liberty taken with the stories and their outcome.

This one is a lot of fun for people who don't care about how true the story is to the original, but don't take it as solid references for paper-writing on folklore.

If you are a folklore fan, you will love this book. There are many interesting chacters in this book. President Andrew Jackson meets a bell witch in Tenn. In Fla. a Big John de Conqueror goes wife hunting with interesting results. Alabama has a Hairy Man to keep the residents of the state company. In Virginia there are strange looking fish to catch. In Mississippi there's a black cat called a plat-eye waiting to scare people. There's a Jack -o- Lantern in Alabama that people have to watch out for. These are only a few of the interesting folklore character's you will meet as you read this very interesting book. I highly recommend this book, there are stories for people of all ages.

When I pick up a book like this one I am normally looking for a book of non-fiction accounts of paranormal experiences. The books that I like most contain stories of ongoing haunts and include eyewitness accounts from people who have experienced the haunt. I often post scathing reviews of books like this one that I buy believing them to be that type of book only to find that the book in question is only a collection of folk stories that generally have no basis in fact. This book however, does not advertise itself as the kind of book I normally read but clearly states on the back cover that it is a book of folklore. That is all I have ever asked. If it's folklore just say so.

Just like any other type of book there are different grades of folklore books and I must say that this one deserves a very high grade. The stories are the type that I grew up hearing and are deeply rooted in the Southern psyche. Many of these tails involve the Devil and the dangers one incurs in dealing with the Prince of Darkness. Most all of the stories involve some type of moral lesson but are also extremely fun to listen to or read. Southern grandparents have been thrilling their grandchildren with these stories for years.

In this book you will find many stories that are pure legends like the story of "The Fiddler's Dram" or the tale about "The Red Rag Under the Churn." There are also stories however that deal with the Bell Witch, the Wampus Cat and the Army of the Dead which are all based on the very real experiences of very real people. The Wampus Cat still puts in an occasional appearance around the tunnels that run under the campus of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

I was particularly fond of the "Tailypo" story because it closely parallels a story that I was told as a child. In this version an old man cuts the tail off of a strange animal and cooks and eats the tail. That night the creature returns to claim his "Tailypo." In the version I grew up with an old woman finds a severed big toe in her potato patch and cooks and eats the toe. That night the toe's owner returns seeking his toe. The end results are the same in both stories and prove that it isn't wise to eat something's "Tailypo" or someone's big toe.

The stories in this book are wonderfully written and are told from the perspective of the original storyteller. This is quite a collection of Southern folklore and the author has obviously done a large amount of research in putting this book together. Best of all, she lets the stories speak for themselves which is virtue not possessed by many folklore books. If you have any interest in folklore I would highly recommend this book and if you grew up in the South I bet that you either heard some of these stories or stories very similar to the ones found in this book. When my grandson gets a little older he may just get to hear about "The Witch Bridle" while we sit around a campfire on a cool autumn evening.

I'm preparing to move to Romania, and read this book to give me an idea of the way things were over there a few years ago. I greatly enjoyed this book. It was well written, and thought-provoking. Every now and then the author would lapse into excessive use of "textbook speech", but for the most part I appreciated the way she wrote. I also appreciated the way she used various stories to get her information across. For someone with little to no interest in this area, this would not be a good book to start with. However, I found it very readable, and highly recommend it.

I read Exit into History for a first-year history course. Hoffman describes her journey through some Eastern European countries in excruciating detail, which made it difficult for me to find any major relevant themes. It's basically a travel journal. Hoffman is a good writer - her descriptions use an interesting range of words, and her sentences are pleasantly structured. I would recommend it to people who have a major interest in Poland, or who are like Hoffman herself: immigrants from Eastern Europe to North America. It's not a story type of book, so you have to be interested in the topic beforehand.

Eva Hoffman, back among her Polish homeland and other former Iron Curtained nations, offers a thoughtful look at the years just after the breakdown of the wall. Not a travelogue so much as an extended series of conversations with usually well-spoken people much like Hoffman herself. Not a book for those seeking Romany flavor, hotel mishaps, and quaint lore. She largely conveys her impressions and ideas in a style reminding me of essays for the New Yorker or the Sunday magazine of her own employer The New York Times.

Her reflections on Havel's Czech Republic, the still lurking oppressiveness of Romania post-Ceausescu, the Bulgarian-Soviet aura, and the Hungarian cynicism mesh nicely with her own Polish rather aristocratic attitudes (not by birth but by predilection?).

While the report's well-written, it does lapse into an over-reliance on the chat in the salon, so to speak, rather than on the street. You feel as if she, naturally attracted to educated dissidents for the most part, wished to relate their stories to us at the expense of a conventional tour of the countries she visits. For instance, little of Slovakia appears, and the sights she describes stick less in the mind than the ideas she ponders.

Fine, but fair warning for anyone expecting another Patrick Leigh Fermor (pre-WWII) or Brian Hall (Stealing from a Deep Place, 1988--Romania/Hungary/Bulgaria cycled through from an American's p-o-v). A useful introduction to how politics inevitably must give way to the ordinary, the human, the lived experience. Although she may differ from Havel, Hoffman provides a beneficial Western counterpart to his own thinking. 3 1/2 stars.

After studying the politics and history of Eastern Europe extensively as an undergraduate in college, I read this book and found it simply marvelous, for in all the history and political science books yo are given fact upon fact, but until I read this book I didn't know what it was like to actually be there. She vividly portrays the countries of the region from an ordinary person's perspective, the sights, the sounds, the feeling in the air of these countries. It can be read as an introduction to Eastern Europe, the avid student, or even the educated expert. It can also be enjoyable as simply leisure reading.

For anyone looking for Cherokee family connections, this is a good place to start. The historical facts are not in chronological order, and can be confusing however.

This is an excellent refrence book for those researching their Cherokee ancestry. It contains the family pedigree's of the Old Settlers, e.g. those Cherokee's who arrived in Indian Territory (Oklahoma)prior to the Trail Tears including some who arrived later. A number of family histories are also included. Because Emmet Starr obtained most of his information from personal interviews with descendants, there are some errors, however the work is invaluable as a genealogy research tool.

Good geneological information, great photographs. This book provides great insight into Cherokee perspectives at the early half of the 20th century.

I found this review of Cherokee history very distasteful in the fact that it portrayed the Cherokee Patriot chief Dragging Canoe as a common outlaw. While the truth be known it was his father Leaning Wood and the "peace faction" he led that undermined Cherokee sovereignty of the homeland in the East.

La Salle County is a very engaging tale that draws you into the lives of its characters. The author has a flair for the discriptive language that truly brings the story and its characters to life. He does not shy away from controversial topics but he is also able to weave tough life situations with tenderness and great emotion. The author made the characters real and flawed, making them very believable. I enjoyed seeing into the intimate details of the lives of the people of La Salle County. I was eager to continue reading to learn more about them. I look forward to more from this author.

La Salle County is the story of the lives of a priest, David, his lover, Anna, and their son, Mark. Early twentieth century society condones neither priests who stray nor illegitimate children, so to protect her lover and her son Anna leaves her home to raise her son under false pretenses. The past and the present intertwine in this book to tell their stories--sometimes together, sometimes separately. We see that even almost a hundred years ago, boys will be boys, as we read of the escapades of pubescent boys in an all male Catholic boarding school. We see the differences between and the similarities in David and Mark. The dialog of the characters in the early 1900s reflects the somewhat more formal speech of the era and adds authenticity. The descriptive scenes are vibrant and realistic and make one feel a part of the scene. A well written book with characters that draw you in and make you want to learn how their lives turn out.

I purchased this book and could not put it down. The writing style is descriptive and refreshing, weaving the present with the past as the story(ies) unfolds. Particularly enjoyable are the introduction of each new character and the deliberately described scenes throughout the book. I could easily visualize the moment. The ethnic references brought back pleasant memories of my own experiences in small town America. The characters are intriguing, leaving me wanting to know even more about their joys, sorrows, and desires. The book centers on a priest who has given in to his human desires and who must live with the consequences of his sins. "La Salle County: A Family Saga" is gripping. As a reader, I would enjoy a sequel.

A Midwestern Corn Salad with Too Much Mayonnaise

I picked up this book because of the beautiful wedding portrait on the cover.? Somehow, I just don't buy two young men like those in the picture stripping down to their tighty-whities and calling each other "faggot" (in l9l6?).? As a matter of fact, the word "faggot" weaves itself through this entire florid mish-mash like a red silk thread.? Is Mr. Hoffman trying to tell us something?

The trouble with fictionalized autobiography is that it ends up being neither memorable fiction nor truthful biography.??? If Hoffman is indeed an illegitimate son sired by a Catholic priest in 1942, that's great!? If he isn't, then why does he wish he were?? I want to read THAT strory.

On the third page of this "saga", one of the characters demonstrates auto-fellatio.? It brings to mind Eddie Fisher's supremely trashy autobiography of several years ago.? In that "Saga", the actress Ann-Margaret drops to her knees and services Eddie...on page three!? Talk about cutting to the chase. The final chapters of "LaSalle County" give? us Ex-Lax in the chocolate chip cookies and a group of boys having a circle jerk.? Where is Mel Brooks when you need him?

Everyone in this book speaks in sanctimonious platitudes,? and at times, it sounds almost like "Fiddler On The Roof":? "Farewell Papa.? God alone knows when we shall see each other again." (cue the violins)? Presented in an endless series of page-long paragraphs, the book must contain more adjectives than any other work in the English language.

"La Salle County: A Family Saga" is an overblown exercise in Ancestor Worship peppered with some really lame gay sex scenes.

I bought this book because I wanted somebody to better explain some of the hard topics in C# instead of just re-typing what I already have in the MSDN files that came with my copy of Visual Studio DOT NET. I thought this book would clarify all my questions about Delegates and Events for example but it did not.
After getting frustrated with the book, I turned to the Web to find help about Delegates and Events and I found some very good articles. This made me think I could have saved a few dollars and headaches by using the Internet. I found that they start talking about some important topic and then they say "Well if you really want to know the complete story please buy another book that talks more about it..." And they haven't even given you at least a basic working example!!!.
I am sure this book has its pearls here and there but so far I haven't spotted any!!!

As has been said before, could use another edit, but its pretty thorough.

I understand how much work goes into huge, comprehensive books like these, and I appreciate how hard the authors must work to meet deadlines. But there is simply no excuse for the sloppiness and inaccuracies that most of these books carry. This one is no different.

The book isn't all bad. Some topics are covered fairly well. And admittedly, C# is a huge topic. But too many chapters are vague and leap across broad topics too quickly. Some simple topics are belabored unnecessarily; meanwhile, whole large topics (like calling constructors in superclasses) aren't discussed, but they pop up in code examples. (Maybe the topic is discussed later in the book and I haven't gotten there yet, but the fact remains that code examples show it before any explanation.)

Someone new to C# is bound to be thrown for a loop by this kind of thing. I guess I've been around the block enough times that I figured out what was going on, but I can remember when this sort of thing would have puzzled and frustrated me for hours or even days.

Then we get to the chapter on multithreading. There's an example on aborting a thread that's comically wrong. The thread isn't aborted! It's still running in the background. A quick check of the task manager proves this. But the authors didn't bother to make that check. So they're leading their readers down the garden path to destruction.

And here's a solid-gold gem from the same chapter:

"AutoResetEvent reets the signaled state of the event to unsignaled when another waiting thread is released. In contrast, ManualResetEvent does exactly what its name implies: It waits until the event is manually reset before changing the signaled state to unsignaled." There's not a word of explanation about what "signaled state" means. You can read this over and over, and it won't make any more sense (unless you already know what it means). As such, it's worse than useless. All a reader can do is skip over it, and hope that the subsequent text and examples will make it clear. Someone should have circled that sentence with an angry red pen and drawn a huge, accusing question mark next to it.

Also in this chapter, the code example shows code calling the Sleep method in an instance of Thread, but that's impossible and won't compile. The method is static. It has to be called from Thread, not an instance of Thread. The author clearly did not even bother to compile his own code. To the woodshed, immediately.

There are sections later on concerning events and delegates that are nearly as bad as the chapter on multithreading. It's enough to make me wonder if the authors really understood these topics.

Finally, there's a chapter on XML that leaves me puzzled. Not because it fails to cover the subject adequately (it does fail to do so), but because it falls so miserably short that it makes me wonder why the authors decided to cover it at all. I remember when I was struggling with XML, XSLT and XSD (along with XPath) all at the same time. Even huge, detailed books on each of these topics couldn't answer all of my questions. The single skinny-Minnie chapter on ALL of these topics will only frustrate and tantalize those who don't already know an awful lot about XML. The cleverest writer on Earth couldn't have done an adequate job in a single chapter. And putting in a note telling readers that they'll need to investigate the topics more on their own is no excuse, if you ask me. If you can't do justice to a topic, then cut it, and expand your coverage on something else. Using XML in .NET, regardless of the language, is a subject that requires at least a single whole book to cover.

A note on the edition. I got the electronic download edition. Amazon listed it as a "PDF." After I got it, it turned out that it was an e-book, which is a type of PDF. I had to get a very recent edition of Adobe Reader, and the book is registered only to me. That's annoying but not too bad. I don't blame them for not wanting the book to be pirated. But what really irritates me is that I can't print any of the book (were they worried that I'd print a copy, then make photocopies?), and I can't even copy and past short snippets. I paid a pretty hefty price for this book. In my opinion, that clearly gives me the right to print out chapters, or the whole thing, if I choose. Being locked out of printing ensures that I will never again pay nearly full price for the digital edition of a book from Amazon. I've been cheated, and I don't like being cheated.

I guess I'll have to fall back on the MSDN for my tutorial. Somebody, please...kill me.

It is no accident that the authors start off the book with a chapter on Visual Studio. A persistent theme in the book is how it is more than just about C# as a language. The authors suggest [strongly] that a key advantage about the language is its extensive integration with .NET and the ease of coding. For the latter, the book gives a brief tour of Visual Studio highlights. Like the ability to bookmark places in source code files, and a "Back" button. Very much following a well-proven and popular browser usage. Plus Visual Studio shows C# files in a tree format, which permits an easier overview of a large source file.

Part 2 of the book deals with the C# syntax. Comprehensive. If you have programmed another object oriented language, then you should not have any problems here.

But later sections in the book may actually be more interesting and useful to you, once you've mastered the syntax. Several chapters show how to use C# with ASP.NET. To easily write more powerful dynamic web pages. Quite aside from C#, you also get a quick, effective education in ASP.NET. With an editing environment where you can drag and drop components from a toolbox onto the web page that you are making. Intuitive, with less chance of error; which enhances your productivity.

The most advanced section is perhaps that about Web Services. In the computing industry, this topic is still somewhat inchoate, but much has been done to flesh out SOAP, WSDL. Including notably WS-Security. The book demonstrates how to construct a Web Service. Some of you may be interested in the Microsoft-specific Web Services Enhancements, version 2. It offers interesting utilities that may be of merit for a specific Web Service that you want to build. These tend to be along the lines of improved security. [Though it is unclear the extent to which the industry is using WSE.]

Well.. It is worth to read it once, but it is not my favorite book.
Some chapters confuse even more then MSDN docs...

Hoffman's book is not so much about teaching the basics of C#. But more about the support infrastructure that Microsoft has built about it. What it terms the .NET Framework. To be sure, some early chapters discuss what is inherently in C#, like the syntax of conditional statements or of string manipulation. The former is essentially what you could have read in a Fortran text of the late 60s. The if-else is so fundamental that all major subsequent languages have copied its syntax. The string functions match those in Java. Ditto for the sections on collection classes.

But the bulk of the book goes deeply into .NET. Higher value-added functionality for C# coders. Easy read and write of XML files. Part of Microsoft's big push into standardising on XML for a lot of data interchanging. Nowadays, reading and writing of XML should be considered a default ability of a current language. C#'s features here just match those of Java, for example.

More importantly, the .NET Framework also includes abilities that are intrinsically specific to Microsoft. Like being able to use COM objects within a C# program. There is certainly no equivalent default ability in the standard Java distributions.

Another worthy case involves tying C# to Microsoft's SQL Server, with such things as stronger means of doing database transactions. Or hooking C# to a web server with ASP.NET. For this, the newest feature seems to be Web Parts, which let the programmer easily mix shared data and data specific to that user viewing the web page.

All of these play to Microsoft's strengths in comprehensive integration of its products.

The author was very brief on many subjects and points the reader too many times to read about subjects elsewhere instead of supplying the information needed.

Regular Expressions are neglected (a very short chapter exists, but really insufficient, in my opinion): "For more information on regular expressions ... These books will give you the information you need ..." Oh, well I guess I bought this book for nothing then ...

Member Visibility Levels are demonstrated by a table and aren't demonstrated nearly enough.

I'm really dissapointed about purchasing this book ...
If one of you guys who reads this review is about to buy it, save the money and simply ask me for my copy ...

Kobi.

I use this book at work to write C# 2.0 Windows Applications with SQL Server 2005. I felt that it was a good book and overall I have little ill to say about it. The examples are well written and do a good job of reinforcing what you read in the chapter. You read a little then do an example, then read some more, then add to the example and so on. You don't need any Programming experience to use this book just a decent understanding of programming logic. The only criticism I could offer is that the author should have left out the hefty ASP.NET content that he probably barrowed from his co-worker Stephen Walther "Author of ASP.NET Unleashed" and reinforced his windows applications with universal examples of complex code. It's a good book for learning C# 2.0 Windows Applications as a whole from the ground up and for this reason it's worth the money. It's not an overnight crash course (if that is what you are looking for).

For those of you who are tired of the typical touristy things to do in Montreal, get this book. It gives some really great ideas!

I found this little guide to be really useful. As a newcomer to the city, it showed me places that I would have never found on my own. It's really the best book to get if you're visiting the city or even if you're a long time Montrealer. As a tourist, you'll see things that you wouldn't have known existed, and as a Montrealer, you'll discover new, enchanting places. This is really a gem of a book.

A neat little soft bound pocket book all of you visitors to Montreal and even local inhabitants may want to read is SECRET MONTREAL. This book was written by Tod Hoffman, photographs by Linda Rutenberg and published by ECW Press. The publishers have informed me that the book may be out dated as it was last published in 1997 and is now in the process of being updated. However, I still found the information, for the most part, relevant and very interesting.

The main objective of the book is to make the traveller to Montréal and even the local inhabitants aware of the many different sites in Montréal that are often neglected. As mentioned in its introduction it will appeal to unique sort of travelers who are really explorers, "those who aren't content to collect exactly the same pile of snapshots taken from exactly the same spot as every other tourist."

Within the first few chapters the author informs us as to how to use the book. It is pointed out that the entries have been organized alphabetically and the table of contents lists all of the secret hideouts and relevant chapters. Once the traveller decides what interests them, he or she can refer to the relevant chapter and find out where the site is located and also have a good idea of why the site is considered to be secret.

For example the first chapter deals with Africa as it is mentioned that Montreal is home to many French-speaking Africans.
We are informed of the many activities related to African culture such as the annual Festival Nuits d'Afrique dedicated to French African culture and music.

Another chapter describes the St. Leonard Caves that is the only cave on the island of Montréal accessible to visitors. Other "goodies" inform us of secret sugar shacks, secret theatre, secret walks and nature parks and even secret restaurants that have, as the author indicates, "a particularly storied pedigree, and with a particular focus on the variety of ethnic cuisine". There are also sections of the book dealing with secret history and even secret hockey.

If you like hot dogs and French fries or as the French Canadian refers to it as "steamie-frites" we learn of the several secret-eating establishments that offer this delicacy.
The chapters are very succinct and informative. We are given telephone numbers, addresses, hours of operation and admission fees for all of the sites. Furthermore there exist several maps showing the exact location of the author's suggestions.

One criticism I have, however, is that the author neglects to mention if any of the sites are wheelchair accessible. Another element omitted is that there is no mention if admission fees can be paid by credit card.

If any of you cyber readers are planning a trip to Montréal or even if you are local inhabitants of the city, this little handy gem of a book will make your trip and experience much more interesting and fulfilling.

Norm Goldman Editor of Bookpleasures.com

This book is _not_ for those who are seeing Montreal for the first time. It does offer a few non-touristy ideas but many secrets aren't that unusual, the organization is lazy, and it's tiny at 160pp. The Ulysses Guide for Montreal (with its extensive walking tours) was way more useful to me as a tourist.