Nevada Books

I used this book in the Las Vegas area in January. It was not very useful. The information given was marginal and years out of date.

First, I have to say I'm a huge fan of the Falcon series, and have about two dozen of their books (conservatively!) that I have used with much success in Montana, Colorado, California, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona and Utah. Usually I would give all of the falcon books four or five stars, as they are some of the best hiking companions on the market.

However, this one looks and feels like a pirated Falcon book. Its thin size is the first indication that something may be amiss - it's a very slim book of about 190 pages.

Let me start with trailheads - you're on your own. Well, OK, there are usually some generalized ones that have (what I assume are) mostly correct directions, but distances are omitted, and without investing in a DeLorme mondo-book of Nevada, the odds of getting lost are much higher than they should be.

Next, the book boasts 80 trails - hey, that's pretty good for the Silver state, right, which is (sadly) not usually thought of as a good backpacking destination. However, there really are only a handful of actual hike sites - most are clustered in State parks and feature numerous, small hikes. The exception is the 67 mile Toiyabe crest trail, which, despite its length, gives you exactly four mountains to serve as landmarks for the distance.

Additionally, the pictures and trail descriptions are horribly uninspiring (often blurry and overdeveloped in the pictures, and sadly lacking depth in description). My only real conclusion is that Bruce Grubbs wrote this book to fill a gap in the Falcon Guides with the implicit goal of discouraging any and all backpacking in the state. It certainly did a good job of that - as I could not find any trails that I could put my faith in in this book on a recent trip to Vegas, I skipped the state entirely and hit Zion and Bryce Canyons (which Falcon has an excellent guidebook for).

Yes, remarkable in that it portrayed one of the "true believers" in the "fight against fascism" during the Spanish Civil War. No doubt as military history it is somewhat accurate as to the difficulties the volunteer brigades met in fighting for the leftist Republic (a fact not mentioned in the book: many of the volunteers had received military training during trips to the USSR, especially future officers) but much of the book is further romanticism regarding the Cause.

Merriman's wife tells of being raped by a Republican soldier... but says she didn't report it because it would hurt the Cause.

Yes, a remarkable book. It gives insight into the True Believers of the Communist Party of the 1930s.

First of all, never trust a guide book to Vegas which states "we don't gamble" (p. 31) and then tries to tell you which casinos are the best. This book is full of opinionated "top ten" lists which only appeal to a certain demographic. (Namely, the demographic which would drive all over town to find the number one 99-cent shrimp cocktail, and then would look for the number one spot to park the RV. Lucky for them, both lists are provided.)

Every traveler to Vegas should see Sehlinger's Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas, which would appeal to a wide variety of tourists. The younger crowd needs to check out Frommer's Irreverant Guide to Las Vegas.

I have to admit I was pretty dissapointed with this one. It has a great setup, Spotting the Hunsacker clan leaving town, Longarm hops a horse and races off in pursuit of them. Now he has got them cornered in the ghost town of Lodestar, Nevada. The group of them on the inside of an old abandoned stone house built like a fort, and Longarm without food or water on the outside...What a terrific setup for a story, imagine the ingenious ways that Longarm can pick them off one at a time,go in and get them or smoke them out. Instead Longarm spends the first third of the book sitting around with no clue and complaining about his job and reminiscing about some women he has had.

Then some women arrive and he kidnaps them and uses them for bait, but he is wounded and spends the rest of the book running away from the bad guys and getting weaker all the time. Finally at the end he has to use a woman to help him get the bad guys.

In the story I didn't have the old feeling that Longarm was the master of the situation, moving events along as he planned them, rather he was just reacting to things and trying to stay alive, not like the old (early) Longarm at all

This book doesn't really have recipes like I expected it to have. I thought it would have hamburger helper, ext in it, but instead it has goulash more freezer recipes in it than I would have liked. The recipes seem a little inconvienant due to the cooking and preparation they require.

The photography is not crisp and there is no depth to the shots. A wonderful idea, not executed very well.

This was a gift for my grandmother, she is new to town and requested a nice laminated map so she could figure out where things were and how to get there. This was the only travel size laminated map we could find. We thought this would be a nice choice for her but this map is to small for her to read and is missing much of the city including the area where she lives. Christmas eve we rushed out to Barnes and Noble to pick up a new much larger map. This is a great buy if you are only looking for a very general idea of where the older parts of town are and dont mind pulling out a magnifying glass to read it.

I had to read this book for my History of California class. I'm a freshman in college and I don't drink wine, because its illegal (duh!). So I read the whole book, intro, epilogue and all the chapters in between. I fell asleep many time reading this book and if you don't like wine and have no interest in the wine industry of santa barbara don't read this book. If you would to find out more of how the santa barbara wine industry got started by all means by this book and enjoy it becuase it right up your alley. I will say this if I was into wine and stuff I know I would have enjoyed reading this book, but since i don't like that kind of stuu, this book was a bore. i think that if you were doing a report on wine or an industry that has floursihed through the prohibition and politics this would be the main source of all your info if you did the report on the santa barbara wine industry. have fun reading wine lovers!!!

Maybe not a bad book, but close. There are much better histories of Nevada and even of Reno (William Rowley's, for instance). There is a map of the original town plan, or I would have given it but one star.

The authors seem to have based their research on a book they were too shy to include in their bibliography, Gilman Ostrander's "Nevada, the Great Rotten Borough." (Even when they take quotes from Ostrander, they get them wrong, such as Yerington's quote about horse thieves!)

They have photos from Don Dondero's Dateline Reno that aren't from that book. What a mess!

Nice idea to take a Look Magazine approach to Reno, but this is hollower than a gourd. UNR Press should recall it before someone gets injured reading it.

Scholarly yes, dry absolutely. I know the author is a Professor, but you need to appeal to your readers. There was some good research into this book, and it is obvious the author traversed some of the roads himself. However, why not elaborate on some of the tales of those emigrants coming into California. This was a relatively short book, but it took me nearly four days for me to read. That said, the author explores new ground on the hardships of people going overland to California. This is a story that needs telling.

This book is for those interested in California history. It is more focused toward the academic audience, and a general reader has to have a great desire to learn more about this subject.