Park University Books

My favorite part of this book is how the author reveals what happened to the beach along bayfront in Hilo. The diversion of the waiolama river project removed about half of the beach. If you're wondering what this has to do with a book review, it's in the details.

This book gives details. It obvious that the author spent a great deal of time here and listened intently to locals when researching his work here. This book enables you to become intimately familiar with the beaches here on the big island.

If you want to learn about big island beaches from a local's perspective, get this book. For those of you just looking to visit for a few weeks, you'll also enjoy the book for it's maps, directions and "what to expect" perspective.

I especially like that fact that only the major beaches are covered. The private, small, secluded, beaches we enjoy locally, aren't always mentioned. When you get here, hire a local guide to reach those truly hidden spots. A local guide will get you to the 4x4 only access areas devoid of other visitors.

Why 4 stars? As a surfer, I cannot give this book more than 4 stars. It deserves 5 stars. It's the best book on big island beaches that I've read (more than 15). It's just too good and it will probably cause more people to surf our already crowded surf breaks. :)

Brent Norris
BigIslandFun.com

This book displays black and white pictures and is totally outdated. Out of all the tour books on Hawaii that I ordered (Frommers 2000, Fodors 2000, Best Places to Stay in Hawaii and the guides books written by Andrew Doughty and Harriet Friedman, Lonely Planet) this was by far the worst. I should have returned it while I could but I wanted to give it a chance. What a waste of time and money.

The best informative book you can buy on the entire coastline of the big island. Much historical info adds to the richness of the general information provided. If you are looking for an out of the way place on the big island, this book will help you find it

This is a great book which could benefit from being updated. With the focus on just beaches, it was extremely useful and I found many great beaches I wouldn't have found otherwise during my three week visit. If beachgoing is your thing, this book will help you find plenty, expecially non-resort ones that are virtually empty.

I purchased this book in 1989 and used it then, and again, later in 1994. I now live on the Big Island and can tell you that this book is not up-to-date on the easily accessible beaches. There have been marked changes in the 4WD beaches, also. What was once my Beach Bible, is no longer useful. It WAS a great book.

I like the concept of writing about the conflict with the Indians that lived in the park. The problem is the information. I am a descendent of the original Indians of Yosemite and there is a problem. The defintion "Some of them are killers" for Yosemite was fabricated in 1978 and is not the original meaning of Yosemite. The real meaning was "The Killers" or "The Grizzlies" because the Miwoks were afraid of the Ahwahnees. It was Chief Bautista and Russio, who were helping the Mariposa Battalion, who coined that term "Yosemite" for the Indians in Yosemite Valley which they were afraid to enter. It is because the Miwoks were once enemies of Chief Tenaya and the Ahwahnees. 30 years Yosemite National Park Service hired a person named Craig Bates who was married to a Miwok woman and had a 1/2 Miwok son who created that new defintion. So it is increble that ONE person changed the meaning and defintion of one of the most important and well known parks in the whold world...and no one noticed. The Miwoks were actually the scouts and guides for James Savage and the Mariposa Battalion, but you would not know it because the information was controlled by the "Indian expert" at Yosemite, which causes wrong information to be written...like the actual defintion of Yosemite.

I like the concept of writing about the conflict with the Indians that lived in the park. The problem is the information. I am a descendent of the original Indians of Yosemite and there is a problem. The defintion "Some of them are killers" for Yosemite was fabricated in 1978 and is not the original meaning of Yosemite. The real meaning was "The Killers" or "The Grizzlies" because the Miwoks were afraid of the Ahwahnees. It was Chief Bautista and Russio, who were helping the Mariposa Battalion, who coined that term "Yosemite" for the Indians in Yosemite Valley which they were afraid to enter. It is because the Miwoks were once enemies of Chief Tenaya and the Ahwahnees. 30 years Yosemite National Park Service hired a person named Craig Bates who was married to a Miwok woman and had a 1/2 Miwok son who created that new defintion. So it is increble that ONE person changed the meaning and defintion of one of the most important and well known parks in the whold world...and no one noticed. The Miwoks were actually the scouts and guides for James Savage and the Mariposa Battalion, but you would not know it because the information was controlled by the "Indian expert" at Yosemite, which causes wrong information to be written...like the actual defintion of Yosemite.

In Dispossessing the Wilderness, Mark Spence, an Assistant Professor of History at Knox College, Illinois, delivers a well-researched volume on a chapter of American Indian history that has gone largely unnoticed. The book tells the story of the National Park Service removing American Indians so that the landscape in each park could be more "natural and fit the common perceptions of nature. The conception of wilderness without natives was so powerful that early preservationists dismissed or ignored evidence of native use and habitation. For instance, Yellowstone National Park management of the 1870s and 1880s felt that the Native American threatened game even when government surveys revealed game numbers were on the rise.

Most national parks expelled Indians early on in their history. Yosemite proved the anomaly in NPS-tribal relations. Unlike Yellowstone and Glacier, the native populations remained long after establishment of the park. Early park management felt Yosemite Indians had a moral right to stay. Tourists expected and enjoyed viewing Indians in their "natural" state. For nearly 20 years the park gloried in its Indian past by hosting an "Indian Field Days" festival. The Indians made a living from tourists by selling their wares and working for the NPS or its concessionaires. After relative peace with the Park Service for over 50 years, the native population became a victim of the growing sentiment that creating a "natural" setting in national parks meant excluding of natives. Yosemite management effectively forced the natives to vacate their ancestral village site and move to small cabins. The NPS exercised near dictatorial control over cabin residents. When each family left, its cabin was destroyed to prevent another family from laying claim on it. In effect, relocating the Indians to the cabins was a long term-plan to wield more control over the Indians and slowly expel them in a way that would not raise a fuss among Indian advocates. The plan succeeded when the last Indian families vacated the cabins in the 1960s. Fortunately the Yosemite Indians still have a presence in the park, in the form of an Indian cultural center on the site of the former cabins.

The book relates much of the same information as Robert Keller and Michael Turek's volume American Indians and National Parks, but more succinctly and with better visual aids. Mingled with the narrative are excellent photos, illustrations and maps with thorough explanations in their captions. One such illustration fully demonstrates the bad blood that existed between the Blackfeet and Glacier National Park administrators by depicting then NPS director Horace Albright kneeling within the boundaries of the park with sharp claws extended trying to grasp the Blackfeet reservation (97).

For a volume focusing on Native Americans' relationship with NPS management, it also contains other pertinent historical information on national parks. The book's scope is narrow - it only explains Indian-white relations in Yellowstone, Glacier and Yosemite national parks. This confined breadth has its advantages in a detailed story of Native American-park management relations in each park, but may leave the reader wanting more. The book's epilogue does contain a brief summary of Indian situations in Grand Canyon National Park, Death Valley National Park, and a few parks in Alaska. For further reading on other parks, those interested will need to turn to Keller and Turek's volume as well as Indian Country, God's Country by Philip Burnham and Inhabited Wilderness, by Theodore Catton.

This book examines how the National Park Service removed Indians from their traditional lands while constructing the idea of "wilderness" in the national parks. This idea differs from the original idea of wilderness, which encompassed vast spaces inhabited by both Indians and wildlife. Once white Americans came to think of "wilderness" as "devoid of people," the Indians had to go.

Spence demonstrates this claim with respect to three parks, Glacier, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. Yosemite poses an interesting contrast to the other two, in that Native Americans continued to live in the Valley until the end of 1996 - - though most were gone several decades before then. By having some variation in the cases, Spence gets more leverage out of this story than Philip Burnham's "Indian Country, God's Country," though Burnham covers more tribes and parks.

By grounding the story in a larger narrative about the conception of wilderness, Spence also makes this story *matter* in ways that Burnham does not - - Burnham's book became a familiar litany of injustices, while Spence's makes sense of the injustices beyond simply complaining about them. This gives him a stronger foundation on which to think about issues that Burnham struggles with, such as finding alternative roles for indigenous people in protected areas in developing countries, or the role of Native Alaskans in Alaskan national parks and preserves.

I've spent much of this review contrasting Spence with Burnham because they cover overlapping ground and appeared at roughly the same time. Both are worth reading, but I think Spence has the stronger overall book.

I like the book, but Yosemite NPS DID NOT establish ties with the original Native Americans. Instead Yosemite NPS established and hired Indians who moved into the park to work in the 1900s. Yosemite mistakenly now keeps ties with Yokuts and not with the original Yosemites Indians.

They Yosemite NPS has hired a park ethnologist who we believe does not have a degree, but was married to a Miwok woman. He has been re-writing the true history of the Indian people in Yosemite. Sad, but true.

Seller shipped and item was received before the estimate delivery date. Item in condition just as described.

Almost no notes or comments on compiled materials in the book. It is difficult to find keys to understand materials from this book without assistance from teachers or study guides. The materials themselves are instructive and interesting. The book becomes voluminous due to the appended rules and their notes. If one has a separate rule book, he/she has to spend more for the unnecessary appendix attached to this book.

Please note that there is both a tenth edition and an UPDATED tenth edition. They're virtually identical, but the updated edition has materials related to the Crawford case addressing the confrontation clause.

This is a must read for every teen or adult that believes history is simply about boring dead white people and inconsequential dates. Can you write a "real" history book that has valid arguments about.....SWIMMING POOLS? Dr. Wiltse has caught the attention of the young people of this nation who believed that history, real history, has to be about a President, King, or a General, and has taught us all that seemingly mundane events in the lives of common people, often overlooked, are history too!

So far I am a quarter of the way through this book and it has repeated the same information several times. As soon as the author progresses into the 1900s he quickly shifts back to the 1890s and then up to the 1900s and then back again. The information could have been a little more carefully strung together and not so repetitive. I look forward to finishing this book to see if this gets any better. Despite the irritating repetition the information presented is interesting.

Here comes summer, and Americans will head for a trusted way of getting rid of stress and heat: they will jump into swimming pools. But pools themselves have been a source of stress to many communities within the nation; indeed, Jeff Wiltse has written a history of the social tensions pools have caused (and sometimes eased) in _Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America_ (University of North Carolina Press). It is surprising that what might seem a trivial subject, a pastime in which millions of Americans have innocently indulged for over a hundred years now, might even have a history. But Wiltse, who teaches history at the University of Montana, has driven from town to town to draw information for this book. His travels were mostly in the north, for he did not want to range too far and write separate regional histories, although he says the pattern of social use of pools is consistent within the towns he surveyed. He amassed a huge amount of data from newspapers and civic documents about who was using the pools, with statistics often kept by race and sex. Wiltse has shown beyond doubt that pools have reflected and generated our feelings on sexual and racial matters, and although his book is a serious academic history, it is by turns amusing and sad as America came to an incomplete understanding of how we ought to treat pools and the swimmers who use them.

We didn't have pools originally, going down to swim in the river or "the old swimming hole". The swimmers often had no running water at home and this was a way for them to wash away some bodily grime; their Victorian betters strongly agreed with bathing for this purpose, but not with the way it was being accomplished. The problem of how to get those underclass clean without letting their pastoral cavorting offend others resulted in a solution, the first municipal bathing pools. Remarkably, there was not racial segregation in these initial pools. Pools changed again when they became not centers for training but locales for play. The huge pools were viewed as resorts, places where a family might come on vacation, and they had sand around them for artificial beaches. Pools had been segregated by gender, but these were not; because of fretting over what might happen if white women saw athletic black bodies, or if blacks started appreciating the displayed bodies of white women, racial segregation of pools began. There was violence in many cities when black people tried to use the pool. The way one city after another attempted to exclude black people in different ways makes for uncomfortable reading.

Desegregation eventually happened, but the victory turned out to be Pyrrhic. As blacks were admitted, white swimmers stopped going to the public pools, and so it became easier for cities to reduce maintenance on the pools, which fell into disrepair and were closed. Cities had financial crises in the 1970s, further reducing pool budgets, and have never started up another building surge. White swimmers went to private pools or home pools, and Americans aren't putting a high value on public recreation as much as they used to. Suburban communities are building water theme parks, which are busy places for kids, but do not foster the socialization that families used to find around a public pool. It may not have worked out to be the best outcome for either blacks or whites, but that's the way history works out sometimes. Wiltse's readable history gives a surprising outlook on important aspects of American culture, and shows that swimming pools are far more consequential than you'd expect.

This book consists of a bunch of stories about life on the Olympic Peninsula over the last century or so. Some of those stories come first-hand, while others seem to be tall tales. Even on a quick read, I was able to spot various factual inaccuracies, concerning names, dates, and units of the park and forest.

Some of the most astounding stories may be accurate but stretch credibility in my mind. Murray takes them all in, uncritically.

It's written in a lively style, so if you just want to read a bunch of oldtimer stories and don't care about accuracy, it would be fine.

I've read most of Murray Morgan's popular history books on the Pacific Northwest, and this often-overlooked gem stands out for me. Morgan is most frequently remembered for his tremendously popular history of Seattle, Skid Road, or for his magnum opus Puget's Sound, a thicker and more "academic" treatment of Tacoma's birth and growth.

But The Last Wilderness showcases Morgan's strengths as a storyteller even better than Skid Road, with great characters and rousing tales as grist: Iron John, carrying a cast-iron stove over his shoulder up to his homestead; the rough and tumble of early Grays Harbor, where bodies washed up with the morning tide from nights in the saloons over the piers; the eccentric and idealistic Wobblies, anarchists, and utopians that collected in this corner of the country; Teddy Roosevelt stumping the peninsula for environmental conservation -- to crowds of lumbermen! -- enraged at the timber practices he witnessed. I've hardly read a book that's a more robust slice of life than this.

After many years of wanting to go there, I recently "discovered" the Olympic Peninsula while on a get-away vacation. I also heard about this book and after reading it, I have to give it a qualified thumbs up. Reading this book would have been somewhat bewildering and a little tedious before I traveled to the Olympic Peninsula. Having made the trip before reading the book gave me a basis upon which to appreciate the writing. There are some very interesting and even disturbing stories in here, from the fantastic to the bizarre and the terrible. For anyone interested in a behind the scenes look at one of the most fascinating and beautiful places in America, this book is a must-have. The writing is generally excellent and very readable and the organization is sound and chronologically logical. There are some poignant descriptions of life in earlier times and a rousing look at turn of the century logging practices. On the down side, the discourse on modern resource extraction activities is a bit long-winded and the book concludes with a rather disjointed short chapter which I am still trying to place in the larger context. Overall, a good read and of definite local interest.

Although this book feels a little dated now and could use an update, it is still a must have for preservationists who are interested in the struggles that revolved around this battlefield.

The current price (as of 6/06) of $41 is a little steep for a book of this kind. If you can get beyond the price, this is a quick read. Even at well over 200 pages, it's so interesting that I could hardly put it down and zipped right through it.

Anyone familiar with the Civil War Preservation Trust would surely want to read a book from them in a similar vein as this one. I'm sure they have tons of stories to tell.

In his introduction to Battling for Manassas, former NPS historian Ed Bearss correctly notes that this book ought to be "must reading" for public officials, developers, and preservationists who will eventually find themselves on opposite sides of debates about the preservation of land for historic sites, especially controversies that affect land near the nation's battlefields. Joan Zenzen has done a fine job of researching and writing this administrative history of Manassas National Battlefield Park. She has not only made sense of the paper records that flourish luxuriantly around government agencies, but she has also interviewed key players on both sides of the more recent of the many controversies that have swirled around the park. Zenzen's prose is serviceable if unexciting. A heavier editorial hand might have reduced the number of awkward phrasings and passive voices. Still, in literary style it ranks in the top five percent of National Park Service administrative histories, a notoriously pedestrian genre. A more serious criticism is that the book does not compare the land-use controversies at Manassas with those at other American historic sites, at least beyond limited analogies to Gettysburg and Fredericksburg/Spotsylvania. Perhaps that is just as well. Because it lies just outside the Beltway in an area inhabited by the rich, famous, and the politically potent, Manassas is hardly a reliable model for what might happen in similar circumstances at other American battlefields.

Very technical. I wanted a book to help me do a little rock hounding, but this is a more technical geology book. Not what I was looking for.

This is a magnificent book. I had given up hope finding a good reference work for North Carolina geology and then stumbled upon this book. I highly recommend it for its general discussion of Carolina geological history and its guided tours of specific locations. I'm baffled by the other low review it received.

"For All Seasons" is wonderful complement to a journey to Big Bend for any nature lover. Through reading Ro Wauer's book, I got a clear understanding of what a park naturalist's work entails. The work is a paradoxical blend of solo time hiking in the mountains, inventorying plant and animal species, along with leading tourists on nature walks around the campground. It was on one of the latter that the famous "poodle story" took place - more I will not say.

"For All Seasons" works equally well as a preparation for a trip to Big Bend, reading while at the park, or a companion to reminisce with on return. Wauer knows both the heavily visited and nearly inaccessible corners of the park, and makes you his companion on his journey.

Ro's bent is certainly toward the birds of the Big Bend. If you love birds, you will certainly get your quota of bird reports. Being quite fond of the area, it was a nice "walk in the park". I did manage to find a few gems that kept my attention.

This book provides a good chronicle of the events leading to and immediately following the Len Bias tragedy. Where it falls short is in its glowing portrayal of a certain University Chancellor, who prior to the tragedy knew full well what was going on in the Athletic Department, but after the tragedy pinned all responsibilty on others. This has come to light in the years following the publication of this book. In this respect the book missed the mark.

This story was a great account of the turning point of college basketball, in which the view began to shift more towards the personal and academic side of the athlete as opposed to the athletic side. I would read it all over again.

it was a well written but kind of wordy. Very interesting book!

Pardo takes on a difficult project and makes it accessable to a broad audience. Her analysis of race, class, gender and neighborhood politics is excellent. We learn that neighorhood context has important ramifications for how local politics are expressed, but still, grassroots activism emerges where inequality is found. The only weakness in this book is the occasional redundancies in the discussion, particularly where latter chapters seem to repeat earlier ones. But, as a book that expands the discussion of both gender and race in the context of urban social movements, this is one of the best. It balances case studies and well developed grounded theory well. Moreover, the book appeals to a broad audience in academic settings and the broader public.