New Jersey Books

Having hailed from this part of New Jersey, I was very interested in learning of its history and development. The book was very informative, but I wish it had contained even more information, particularly about Fort Monmouth. All-in-all, I felt it was very well done.

this book covers a fair number of small rivers in new jersey. It has lots of background information on the towns they run through, but it seems to be aimed more at people who are "exploring" the rivewrs by driving near them in a car. If you're really interested in canoeng in New Jersey get Edward Gertler's Garden State Canoeing-it's fantastic and covers details about every conoeable stream in the state. This book (Exploring....) is better for sight seeing.

This is a book with lots of pictures. Every single page has atleast one picture on it, then a small blurb of the picture. This is the content of the entire book. It mostly skims through the history of the school in just 127 pages. Small book to cover 100 years of history. I graduated from GCU and do appreciate it. If you are looking for in-depth information this is not the book to get.

Mr. Luftglass has been fishing the NJ coastal waterways longer than I've been alive. Found within these pages are many tips that will help you catch fish on various NJ waterways.

However the book was that was written, essentially by his own admission, while Manny had nothing else to do spending a winter down in Florida. There is too much direct transcription from notebooks or from phone calls to tackle shops rather than current research on a particular area. "I tried calling all the shops in the area, but they were closed. So from my notes I see that ....". Some pages are nothing other than ramblings that would be better suited to a Friday column hyping up fisherman for the weekend party boat business.

If you are a collector of random bits of advice on fishing NJ estuaries, this book will in fact provide some information that you probably didn't have before. It will give you a jump start on searching out a new area, and a few ideas on fishing for specific species. Don't expect a comprehensive guide to any particular area. You'll have to get out and explore. Perhaps that's what the author had in mind anyway.

If you are up for adventure in NYC and cant afford a great big vacation this is awesome. Not many people know about this path, it goes from NYC to the top of NY state through amazing terrain, you can hop into the trail at any point, but a great challenge is to do the whole thing!

Mad Monks on the Road (the first book by perennially-traveling self-published magazinists and soulmates Michael Land and Jim Crotty) is one of those books I just didn't know what to do with when I finished; unlike any other book I've read recently, it had a weird disposible quality (I was half-expecting recycling instructions on the back cover)...yet it's, well, neat to have around.

The story is by turns delightfully whimsical and maddeningly wispy. (Mike's hippie-ish and Jim's a Buddhist and both have an admirable sense of what's campy--and they run right at it.) The authors' habit of introducing each person they meet by zodiac sign made me cringe after a while, but perhaps that's just my personal bias. I've previously read The Mad Monks' Guide to California and Michael Lane's Pink Highways, and was really surprised by the sharp contrast in style (over so few years, no less). On the Road is a much less-tempered flight of fancy ("The Monks and How They Got That Way," kinda) which shares with Pink Highways only the nagging question of how much the reader can expect to be true (because it may well all COULD be, but it's hard to fathom living in the same world as these characters and not knowing it). Given the tone of the book, it isn't really surprising that even though their macrojourney is ostensibly from San Francisco to New York, they spend a large chunk of the book going from east to west.

I would almost say it's worth reading just to be able to discuss the ambiguous relationship between the authors--Michael Monk is gay and Jim Monk is probably everything else--but that's really the least satisfying element of the book. Then again, maybe I'm just envious: the Monks have such funky friends and unfathomable (mis)adventures, if you've got the travel bug this book will only feed it.

This is a rather dated work. Published back in the early 1960s it suffers from a limited perspective of the Rev War. If the reader is expecting a detailed reference of historical sites in NJ pertaining to the Rev War then he will doubtless be disappointed here. The author provides four rather dry chapters on the Rev War and how it occured in NJ. Much of this information is available in most general histories of the conflict that have been published since this work first came out. There is nothing much new here that stands out. Even as a work of local history this book falls short. The maps are basic and infrequent.

For its length of 100 odd pages the reader will find a very general history of the conflict. Useful perhaps to the basic reader who has little or no prior knowledge of subject. The short length of the narrative will doubtless appeal to high school students required to do some reading on the Rev War. If one is searching for a ready reference on historical locales in NJ that are still accessible today this book falls completely short. If you want a quick, basic read on the Rev War with a few references to NJ thrown in perhaps this is for you. Not recommended overall and overpriced for what you get!

The book is an excellent source for those studying NJ history.

The book describes how different military conflicts impacted NJ and they range from the pre-revolutionary period to Vietnam.

The book is brief and to the point and includes a "Glossary" as well as "Suggestions for Further Reading."

Students of NJ History: buy this book!

This is a very nice book of photos. In fact, in some ways it is an above-average entry in the generally wonderful (though uneven) Arcadia local history books. It would make a decent, moderately priced gift for a wide range of folks --- alumni of one of the Princeton schools, former or current residents of the town, those with genealogocal interests and ties to the town.

That said, it will be a little disappointing to anyone with a real knowledge and interest in Princeton history. Given the massive wealth of photos of 19th century Princeton this work does nto seem to have been as thorough researched or a wisely selected as it could have been. A read through the acknowledgment identifies the problem -- Smith seems to have relied mostly on the Princeton Historical Society. The PHS (of which I was a dues-paying member for years) has a wonderful collection, and no doubt Gail Stern and her team were generous and helpful. But there are MANY other great sources of Princeton photos. The biggest omission I notice is the Princeton Theological Seminary's collection. The Seminary has been a presence in the town since 1812. It occupies 70 acres in teh center of town, bordering the University, and has some of the lovliest building around. Only 3 or 4 of these are featured in the book, and they are far form the best or most interesting shots I know of. In fact, the Special Collections department in Luce Library has thousands of great 19th century photos not only of the seminary campus, but of eating clubs, local townsfolk and animals, etc.

This is just one example. The University archives, no doubt, has many more items, as do the individual historic churches and organizations, and several private collectors in town. (One person I know of has hundreds of old Princeton postcards, for example).

This could have been a 5-star book with just a day or two extra spent with some of these other resources.

Having read about this new book first in the Princeton Packet and later on the Princeton website, and having admired the handsome cover and elegant description here on Amazon.com, I had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately, after the hour or two I spent reading this (no more), I was left mostly disappointed. The book's "rich text" consists of no more than ten pages of prose, with the rest coming in the form of captions to black and white photos. The making of A Beautiful Mind is indeed "chronicled," but only in one, not-particularly-interesting still from the set. Although several photos are of interest, particularly of long-gone campus buildings, they are presented in the dullest possible way, almost always two to a page. That said, the captions to them are factually accurate, and often pithy or even witty. The author knows his stuff. I can't help feeling, however, that a better book might have been made with choicer photos in a more dynamic layout. Perhaps the author felt constrained not to tread on ground already trod by Don Oberdorfer's superior Princeton: The First 250 Years. For all but the completist, I'd recommend that, J.I. Merritt's Best of PAW, or Raymond Rhinehart's Campus Guide before this one.