DC Washington Books

The Images of America series features a wide range of topics by numerous authors. Some are quite good, others more mediocre, and a few are downright bad. This book falls at the lower end of the mediocre category.

The book covers only the area from Capitol Hill to Foggy Bottom, stopping short even of Georgetown. Generally, those are the areas out-of-towners stick to on their vacations, so this book will be relevant to them. Thomas Carrier, the author, virtually ignores the rest of the city and metropolitan area.

Dates are provided only for some of the photographs and illustrations, lessening their value. Quixotically, many of the captions go on at length about some building, then say that the illustration depicts the site before all that happened - leaving out anything about what you're actually looking at. The illustrations are keyed to maps at the beginning of each chapter - that's fine, but no street address is provided in most of the captions, which would have been useful. There also are a great many statues illustrated - again, fine for tourists, but not having much to do with the life of the city.

One example of the book's lack of focus: On page 105 is a fine photograph of the Watergate band barge, a fixture of Washington life for several decades until the advent of loud jet planes forced its removal in the early 1960s; the nearby Watergate complex of the 1960s got its name from this location. The foreground of the picture shows dozens of canoes filled with people crowding close to the barge early on a summer evening. Steps for people to listen to the free concerts are still by the river today - for no apparent reason until one understands the original purpose. Yet Carrier's caption is concerned completely with Memorial Bridge, seen only dimly in the background. His only comment on the barge is it's a "floating band stand."

The absence of Carrier's understanding of social events and context and his focus on simplistic touristy features underscore the tone of the entire book.

The reviews below are right. This is not a useful book.

I am a recent college graduate who is moving to the DC area in a couple of months. As I am unfamiliar with the city, I purchased McFadden's book in hopes of getting better acquainted not only with the city itself, but also with the housing options that exist there. I found McFadden's approximations for apartment rent to be inconsistent with the information supplied to me by realtors and apartment managers. Further, four of the internet sites he lists as good resources do not even exist or have nothing to do with DC housing arrangements. His inconsistency and inaccurate information with regard to some facts makes it hard to trust any advice or suggestions he gives.

The reviews below are right. This is not a useful book.

I had found the San Francisco edition of the "Relocating to..." series extremely useful last year, so I thought this book would be similarly helpful for my move to Washington, DC and reacquainting me with the area after several years elsewhere. Unfortunately, the book is marred by factual errors and typos, misplaced (or absent maps)and questionable organization.

On the plus side, the book provides brief descriptions of various neighborhoods in the DC metro area and related statistics. There's also useful information about the pros and cons of renting or buying in some of the areas introduced earlier as well as information on various recreational and volunteer opportunities. In addition, the book contains useful sections on managing a move, dealing wih movers and other aspects of relocation, although much of this sort of information is freely available on various moving-related websites.

However, the book suffers from numerous mistakes. The author appears to have put effort into creating the book, so whether the mistakes are his or the result of the way the book was handled in the publishing process, I don't know. Off the top of my head, here are just a few examples of the kinds of errors I discoved:

-The book states crime in Georgetown runs 5x the national average, making it--based on comparison with other statistics in the book--more dangerous than Capitol Hill and most other areas described. This mistake made me question all the information provided about the neighborhoods' crime rates.

-The book states Washington, DC consists of only 26 square miles. (It's around 69 square miles.)

-The book says that most landlords require a security deposit of one month's rent in addition to first and last month's rent and then segues into a discussion of living with roommates. The apartment searching I've done over the past several weeks suggests that while some require a month's rent as security deposit, a significant number of landlords --including the large leasing companies--only require deposits of $250-$750, I've seen nothing about having to pay the last month's rent. Do a search on one the rental websites and you can confirm this yourself.

-For decades, the airport across the Potomac from Washington was called National Airport. A few years ago, it was renamed Reagan as Ronald Reagan National Airport, not Ronald Reagan International Airport as named in the book. It is not an international airport because the runways are too short for large jets.

-The book mentions the importance of Route 50 in its discussion of Arlington. However, there is no map of Arlington portraying Route 50 in a map of Arlington. In fact, the map in the Arlington sections highlights Alexandria, not Arlington, and there is no map in the Alexandria section.

-In the various listings of neighborhood stores and restaurants, the quadrant designations (such as NW, NE, SE and SW) are sometimes omitted. Given that identically named, but quite different, streets exist in DC, following standard practice and providing the full street name would lessen the potential confusion of newcomers to DC.

-Why, after discussing the neighborhoods in relation to their Metro access, is the discussion of the various Metro lines saved until far later in the book?

-Also, why not combine the section on the pros and cons of a neighborhood, etc. with the neighborhood descriptions presented earlier (as done in the San Francisco book? It would save a lot of flipping back and forth.

In addition, although this is the result of a hot real estate market and not the fault of the writer or publisher, the rental rates and housing prices described in the book are substantially lower than the actual current going rates. You may want to search the real estate ads on WashingtonPost.com and the rental websites to get a better sense of market conditions.

All in all, if you don't know anything about DC, this book might be worth skimming for some of its information about the neighborhoods. If the author and publisher were to issue a revised, corrected edition, it would boost the usefulness of the book and help justify the purchase price.

Although this guide may help the first time mover, it is too overly general to be of any specific help to someone wanting to know about relocating in particular to the Washington D.C. area, such as utilities, taxes, car registration. Its index is insufficient to help pinpoint any necessary item of information. The neighborhood descriptions are brief at best. There are much better guides for your money.

I have to agree. Arcadia needs to create standards for their authors, and contract with historians and writers, not the amateur wannabees. The consistancy of the series is the problem...some great, some like this poorly executed.

I bought this book because I used to live in the Palisades and have fond memories of my time ther. I found the content of the book to be very uneven. Some pictures in the book depict places that are really in Georgetown, not the Palisades. There are significant omissions in the content, with no pictures of such significant neighborhood institutions as Mount Vernon College and Sibley Hospital. It's as if the author published her own personal photo album rather than trying to put together a more objective look at a neighborhood.

The information in this book is all out of date, and the information given is based on firm-wide reviews (not DC-specific), so it doesn't necessarily reflect DC office expectations.

After I purchased this book, I learned that my law school career office provides free online access to Vault's updated reviews. I'd suggest checking out options like that rather than paying for this.

I bought this at the same time as the Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, but shouldn't have bought both. This seems to just take all the firms from the Top 100 book that have DC offices and re-list them. No new information. In fact, most of the text is straight from the Top 100 book, but that book is almost wholly New York-centered. So you read quotes in the DC book about bad partner-associate relations, but you don't know if that was a NY or DC person saying it. This book is really not very helpful.

I thought the author would actually REVIEW the outlet malls, not just tell us where they are (you can get that for free on the Internet!) He warns that not all "outlets" really offer great bargains -- but you have to check 'em all out yourself to find out which ones do.

And guess what -- he says you can get great prices at Sams, KB Toys, and Tuesday Morning. Well, "duh".

"Mr. Cheap" doesn't seem to know anything about most of the wonderful bargain sources that exist in the DC/NoVA area. In this area, we have LOTS of places where people can get end-of-season clothes, returned and unused items of all types, leftovers from building jobs, furnishings from places that have closed (not the scam ones listed in this book, some of which I checked out only to find ancient junk and NOT the superbuys he claimed), cooking supplies, hardware, jewelry supplies, hard-to-find clothing sizes, and many more. Also, his restaurant listings are a joke. Readers would be better off with the archived reviews from the Washington Post. And the paeans to Tuesday Morning and similar chain stores?? What a joke! Who needs what are basically Sunday paper ads? Books like this should have NEW information about one-of-a-kind places, not chains. Whoever put this second edition together copied the good info from the first book but forgot to research almost anything new. Maybe a third edition, with input from REAL investigation will be upcoming. I'll be waiting.

The authors missed the mark completely on this book. Little history, incorrect history, and teasers on the cover that are not mentioned in the contents. Booo!

From the title of this book, I assumed that an up-to-date treatise of the biology of crocodiles and alligators, including a well-researched and informative bibliography, would be forthcoming. How wrong I was. The book in paperback format is simply a cheaply-bound set of A4 photocopies. Unfortunately, things go downhill once the covers are opened.

The book is divided into three sections, the first of which reads like pro-research propaganda written as though the author's life depended on the idea of promoting and supporting the idea of research. At nearly 20 pages, this is massively verbose and has virtually nothing to do with the book's title. The only piece of crocodile information present is a brief section entitled "prologue" which contains one of the most embarrassing errors about alligator biology that I've seen. The second section of the book, an index and bibliographic resource, is perhaps the only redeeming feature of the book. Yet, with only 121 references, most of which are taken from the biochemical literature and all of which are at least five years old, this section is of limited value to anyone interested in the book's real title. The final section of the book, which is quite extensive, is devoted to a list of medical and other reference books which have nothing whatsoever to do with crocodilians - or even zoology.

To summarise, do not waste your money on this publication. One of my major gripes is the utterly misleading title - if you expected a serious publication on crocodilian biology, look elsewhere. The contents are of little use to anyone interested in the biology of alligators and crocodiles. Far better choices would include Webb & Manolis' "Crocodiles of Australia" and Ross' "Crocodiles and Alligators".

I am a research entomologist, specializing in urban pests, particularly cockroaches and termites. I ordered this title, thinking that it might be a reference that I had overlooked. I shouldn't have bothered. This looks like the barely formatted output from a literature search from one of the scientific databases with some primitive indexing on authors and key words. It includes 138 references published from 1991-1995, a small fraction of the relevant literature published during that period. Abstracts are not included. The indexes cover pages 21-106, the actual references pages 107-157. The only "text" has nothing to do with the alleged subject. The whole thing appears to be photocopied, single-sided, and mounted in a cheap plastic report binder. The length of this item is grossly inflated since it was printed in large type with wide margins. I would actually argue that this is not a book in the sense that most people would understand the term. Don't waste your time.

I opened this book, scanned the pages, and immediately returned. It turned out this book was a poorly organized list of publications, references and assorted odd lists that required manual cross referenceing from long, unsorted subject lists in the beginning of the book. There were no abstracts or summaries of any of the work. Any professional with access to Medline or a library would do a better job of sorting this information.
I did not see any section that would benefit a lay person either. I am actually outraged that somebody would try to pass this off as a index of information. I just hope some cancer patient or theri family does not purchase this to help them understand oncology therapies

If you are considering buying this book, stop now! It's a total waste of $57.50 -- or even of $1.00 - unless you need an example of the risks of buying books from a vanity publisher. I felt ripped off by the publisher and suspect that I would feel this way about any book from Abbe Publishers. (And I feel even more strongly about this after reading a review of another book from this publisher printed in the Journal of Southern Academic & Special Librarianship.)

Where to begin with the specifics?
1. Within the dissertation-sized publication, which claims to provide the reader with "new information beyond all textbooks," there are specific references to only 187 documents, a good number of which are letters, comments, and organizational statements rather than the professional journal articles and books I was expecting.

2. The reference list is very basic in its format and includes no annotations or abstracts.

3. There's more white space than content.

4. The content of the prefaces, dedications, prologue, introduction, and epilogue are strange and badly written. Example: page 157: "Epilogue and Fare-thee-well. What are refugees? The disasterou8 effect of intellectual evolution gone awry." (The 8 at the end of "disasterou8" is in the book.)

5. There's a list of books that supposedly contains the "latest information" about the topic. All that's given is a shortened version of the title of the books, and the reader is instructed to go to Books In Print for the full information. And as far as I can tell, most of the books are not about refugees.

6. The topic index is a joke (but I'm not laughing).

Save your hard-earned money and stick to electronic database searches.