Pacific Books - Page 10

Best Rail Trails Pacific Northwest: More Than 60 Rail Trails in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho

Natalie Bartley

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Editorial Review:

Best Rail Trails Pacific Northwest is the complete guide to walking, jogging, biking, and cross-country skiing  more than sixty of the best rail trails in one of the most beautiful and geographically varied reaches of America.

Fodor's Alaska 2009 (Full-Color Gold Guides)

Fodor's

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Editorial Review:

Fodor’s. For Choice Travel Experiences.

Fodor’s helps you unleash the possibilities of travel by providing the insightful tools you need to experience the trips you want. Although you’re at the helm, Fodor’s offers the assurance of our expertise, the guarantee of selectivity, and the choice details that truly define a destination. It’s like having a friend in Alaska!

• Your vacation never looked better. This Fodor’s full-color guide paints an unforgettable picture of Alaska with vibrant maps, vividly illustrated features, and stunning color photos.

• Updated annually, Fodor’s Alaska provides the most accurate and up-to-date information available in a guidebook.

• Fodor’s Alaska features options for a variety of budgets, interests, and tastes, so you make the choices to plan your trip of a lifetime.

• If it’s not worth your time, it’s not in this book. Fodor’s discriminating ratings, including our top tier Fodor’s Choice designations, ensure that you’ll know about the most interesting and enjoyable places in Alaska.

• Experience Alaska like a local! Fodor’s Alaska includes unique photo-features that impart the state’s culture, covering bears, whales, native crafts, Denali National Park & Preserve, the Midnight Sun, glaciers, and Alaska's Gold Rush, and much more!

• Indispensable, customized trip planning tools include “Top Reasons to Go,” “Word of Mouth” advice from other travelers, and tips to help save money, bypass lines, and avoid common travel pitfalls.

• Pullout color map and updated topographical maps of the best parks and preserves.

Visit Fodors.com for more ideas and information, travel deals, vacation planning tips, reviews and to exchange travel advice with other travelers.

Newcomer's Handbook for Moving to And Living in the San Francisco Bay Area: Including San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, And Palo Alto (Newcomer's Handboks)

Sabrina Crawford

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Extensively updated and revised for 2006, this 504-page new edition maintains its strong focus on San Francisco, but expands greatly its coverage of the entire region, especially Silicon Valley. Of the 174 pages devoted exclusively to discussion of neighborhoods and communities, 52% describe San Francisco neighborhoods and North Bay communities, while 48% focus on the East Bay, Peninsula, and South Bay towns. This edition also includes a new, detailed map of San Jose designed to accompany the in-depth treatment of each of its neighborhoods, reflect the importance of the city, and complement the more broadly focused South Bay area map.

From Santa Rosa to San Francisco to Vallejo, from Walnut Creek to Oakland to Newark, and from San Bruno to San Jose to Los Gatos, this Newcomer’s Handbook® provides its readers with the most up-to-date information on housing styles, costs, and trends; redevelopment; and all the other niceties of Bay Area life, including education! and childcare, transportation, cultural life, and much more.

Frommer's California 2009 (Frommer's Complete)

Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert, Matthew Richard Poole

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Editorial Review:

America’s #1 bestselling travel series

Written by more than 175 outspoken travelers around the globe, Frommer’s Complete Guides help travelers experience places the way locals do.

• More annually updated guides than any other series

• 16-page color section and foldout map in all annual guides

• Outspoken opinions, exact prices, and suggested itineraries

• Dozens of detailed maps in an easy-to-read, two-color design

Frommer's. The best trips start here.

Experience a place the way the locals do. Enjoy the best it has to offer.

• Explore the bounty of the Golden State-from its cosmopolitan cities to its ancient redwood forests, beaches, deserts, lakes, and mountains.
• Outspoken opinions on what's worth your time and what's not.
• Exact prices, so you can plan the perfect trip whatever your budget.
• Off-the-beaten-path experiences and undiscovered gems, plus new takes on top attractions.

Birds of Northern California

David Fix, Andy Bezener

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Very Best of Its Kind 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 13 people found this review helpful.

I am an advanced-amateur birder, and I own four separate bird guides. I live in the Bay Area, and this is by far the guide I use the most. I've owned it for three years, and virtually every bird I've seen has been within its pages. It's very easy to navigate because of its "thumbnails" in the opening pages - you can easily spot your bird there without having to flip through the whole guide.

It's also very well written. It is always eloquent, occasionally humorous, and does a wonderful job of capturing the personality and "feel" of each bird. A problem I have with the overrated Audubon guide, and even sometimes with the fine Sibley and Stokes guides, is that they are too consistently technical. They rarely give unusual background or personality information about the birds. By contrast, this Fix-Bezener guide has something pleasurable to read in every entry.

Some folks might want to supplement this guide with the Stokes Field Guide, Western Region, because it includes photographs. Or perhaps with a Sibley guide if you really want to get into the details. But for 90% of Northern California birders, this single guide will do just fine.

Editorial Review:

Learn about 320 species of Northern California birds in fascinating detail. Descriptions, illustrations and range maps help you identify birds and understand their habits. A checklist helps you keep a list of your birding accomplishments. Perfect for beginner birders and beyond.

2009 California Wall Calendar

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Plenty of room to write 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I'm always looking for a wall calendar with plenty of space for me to write: doctor appointments, school events, piano lessons, and so on. (Some calendars put so many international holidays, there's no room left to write anything.) This is my third or fourth year using calendars by David Muench and Marc Muench. There's plenty of room to write my appointments, and the photos are spectacular!

Editorial Review:

Stunning images from some of the country's top, award-winning photographers make up the signature State Calendar Series from Graphic Arts Center Publishing Company. Coupled with a new grid design for 2009 and features like extra space for notes and four-month planning grids, our state and specialty calendars are not just organizational tools, but works of art for any season. Special features: 12 1/4" x 12 1/4" * Shrink-wrapped with hidden stiffener * Award-winning photography * Space for notes each month * e-z rite coating on each page so pen ink won't smear * Bonus photography and 4-month planning grids.

Walking L. A.: 38 Walking Tours Exploring Stairways, Streets and Buildings You Never Knew Existed

Erin Mahoney Harris

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Beyond its maze of freeways, Los Angeles is a great place to walk. Step out of your car and set out on foot to discover hidden streets, architectural masterpieces, Hollywood romance, lost canyons, and vibrant SoCal culture in places like trendy Silver Lake, colorful Echo Park, eclectic Venice Beach, and more. Completely updated and expanded, the second edition of this award-winning book--the first in Wilderness Press's popular Walking series--features expanded trips with dozens of additional points of interest, useful new information like nearby Metro stations and stroller-friendly walks, and four new trips to family-friendly South Pasadena, San Pedro's developing waterfront district, Glendale's picturesque Brand Park and quaint Kenneth Village, and the uber-hip Atwater Village.

This two-color, portable guide, aimed at locals and visitors alike, features 38 walks, detailed maps for each trip, original photos, and critical public transportation information for every trip. Route summaries make each walk easy to follow, and a "Points of Interest" section summarizes each walk's highlights.

• The 38 walks include trivia about architecture, local culture, and Hollywood history, plus tips on where to dine, have a drink, shop, or get a massage.
• New edition of PMA Benjamin Franklin Award-winning title includes updated and expanded existing routes.

Faces of Sunset Boulevard: A Portrait of Los Angeles

Patrick Ecclesine

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Faces of Sunset Boulevard: A Portrait of Los Angeles is a collection of photographs of the people who live, work, play, and shape Los Angeles. Some are making fortunes along the route; others are just trying to survive to see another day. Patrick Ecclesine captures the city’s dreams, dreamers, and, at times, nightmares using the most famous boulevard in the world as the setting for his photographs.

The individuals featured range from the famous (Governor Schwarzenegger, Larry King, Fernando Valenzuela) to the unknown (a street vendor, an undocumented worker, a bus driver) to the unwanted (a homeless man, a single mother on welfare, a drug addict).

Other archetypal Angeleno figures—from a television weathergirl sensation to a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to surfers in Pacific Palisades to the eccentric and outlandish denizens of the Sunset Strip—stand side by side in these pages, capturing the eclectic nature of the City of Angels and its most colorful thoroughfare, Sunset Boulevard.

Top Trails Yosemite

Jeffrey P. Schaffer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

An Excellent Addition to the Top Trails Series 5 out of 5 stars.
20 of 22 people found this review helpful.

Wilderness Press originally conceived of the 'Top Trails' series as a set of hiking guides to the best trails in an area. This purpose sets these volumes apart from typical hiking guides which tend to fall into two categories: comprehensive guides to all trails in a region, or descriptions of short day hiking opportunities in an area. The idea was to give visitors to a region quick access to the best hiking and to facilitate ease of use. Perhaps no area of California needs a 'Top Trails' guide as much as Yosemite and very few authors are as qualified to write one as Jeffrey Schaffer.

This book is divided into seven chapters: one for each region of the park. Each chapter lists 5 to 8 hikes ranging in distance from the 1/2 mile walk at Bridalveil Falls to a 33 mile excursion among the High Sierra Camps. Obviously, some of these trails are more suitable for backpacking, a feature that distinguishes this book from others in the 'Top Trails' series. All the great hikes are included. Readers will find route descriptions for Half Dome, the Tuolomne Grove of Sequoias (my favorite grove in the park), Clouds Rest, Hetch Hetchy Resevoir, Glacier Point, and many more. In all, there are 45 trails and routes described here.

What makes this book so good are the standard features found in other 'Top Trails' guides and the expert commentary of Schaffer. Each chapter begins with an overview of the region, a trails summary page listing distance, difficulty, and some highlights of the trails, followed by detailed trail descriptions and carefully drawn maps. Schaffer is one of the top cartographers in the west and his maps are second to none. But in addition to these standard features, Schaffer also offers an extended commentary on the geology, geography, and plant and animal communities found in the park. His theory that Yosemite Valley's rock walls were formed by faulting and vertical fracture planes, not solely by glaciers, is explained in these pages, along with the evidence for it, so that non-specialists can easily understand what they observe as they hike. This sort of expert commentary adds immeasurably to the joy of hiking. That is why I strongly recommend this book by Schaffer. It can enhance any vacation to Yosemite.

Editorial Review:

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the amazing number of choice destinations in Yosemite National Park--Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point, Tuolumne Meadows, Hetch Hetchy, and many other famed locales. Top Trails Yosemite helps you sort through the options. It doesn't describe every possible hike in the Park, only the best. Jeffrey Schaffer has selected 46 of the "must do" hikes in the Park and vicinity. Whether you're looking for a scenic stroll, a full-day adventure, or even a spectacular backpacking trip, you'll find it here. And with at-a-glance information for each hike, visitors can determine which hikes are most suitable to their skills, schedules, and preferences. Books in the affordable and easy-to-use Top Trails series feature elevation profiles, detailed maps, driving directions, and "don't get lost" trail milestones and innovative trail-feature charts.

Touring California and Nevada Hot Springs, 2nd (Touring Guides)

Matt C. Bischoff

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

You'll Never Get Lost! 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1YSMB6ZYXFYYN Matt. C. Bischoff has clearly and concisely listed all the great hidden and publicly known hot springs in Nevada and California. It's a great regional hotsprings guide.

Editorial Review:

Whether you're a practicing balneologist (one who seeks the healing properties of natural hot springs) or just an occasional dipper, this book steers you toward the natural baths from Surprise Valley in Northern California to the Mexico/California border. By the looks of the overview map, there may be more hot springs than casinos in Nevada, with warm waters to suit both your style and desire for adventure. Steamboat Hot Springs, 11 miles south of Reno, provides visiting gamblers with a resort-style respite, in contrast to the primitive Gold Strike Hot Spring, found in a narrow valley near the Colorado River. This spring requires a 4-mile round-trip hike and some boulder scrambling "with substantial drop-offs"; the hot waterfalls and canyon views are reportedly worth the effort. Names such as "Crab Cooker," "Dirty Socks," and "Terminal Geyser," combined with tempting black-and-white photos, make you want to grab a towel and head west.