Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest (Lonely Planet Travel Guides) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is another outstanding travel guide from our friends at Lonely Planet. This book is primarily aimed at budget travelers, and contains a host of practical information on places, lodgings, climate, and things to do. Many consider the Pacific Northwest to be the most appealing part of the USA, and this guide provides excellent information on its prime attractions. First, readers will learn about the area's two large cities (Seattle, Portland), both of which are worth a major look. There is also a host of information on superb outdoor sights and activities, including Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Olympia National Park in Washington, the Columbia River Gorge (forming the border of the two states), plus Oregon's Mount Hood and Crater Lake. As the book suggests, hikers, campers, and outdoor types should enjoy the enticing landscape but exercise normal caution on potential hazards from weather, terrain, animals, etc. The book also covers a nearby slice of British Columbia, Canada (including Vancouver), and those wishing to visit should bring their passport. If this guide has a downside, it's relative compactness means imperfect maps and a lack of complete coverage on several interesting locations. Still, this is an excellent overall guide to a very attractive destination.

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Catch a breath of sea air as you watch orcas leap and splash off shore at Lime Kiln PointFind yourself sleeping in a classroom after drinking in the Kennedy School's Detention BarNavigate the Cascades' jagged ridges by eco-friendly llamaBrush off your snowboots and snuggle up by a 92ft fireplaceIn This Guide:Local authors, 217 days of research, 76 detailed maps, five rock concertsYou asked for it, we checked it out - everything you need to know about microbreweries, island-hopping and offbeat locales

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Frommer's Vancouver and Victoria 2011 Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a great concise little book with incredible information regarding your visit to Vancouver or Victoria Island, BC. It's very accurate and timely. I would highly recommend it. The downside - no pictures, it's all text. And it talks about the Wine Tours in Victoria - they are ALL closed except during Season. We went to 12 of them and they were all "closed" (March 2011). But we had a nice ride anyway!

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Completely updated every year, Frommer's Vancouver & Victoria also includes coverage of Whistler and the Pacific Rim National Park.
All of the post 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games attraction updates, including new legacy installations and SkyTrain information.
Our author shows you all the highlights -- from the Museum of Anthropology and Granville Island in Vancouver, to Butchart Gardens and the Fairmont Empress in Victoria -- and takes you outdoors to explore the area's parks, mountains, beaches, and wildlife.
You'll get authoritative and candid hotel and restaurant reviews to help map out the choices that best suit your tastes and budget.
Plus, you'll have shopping and nightlife, detailed walking tours, accurate neighborhood maps, public transportation information, and coverage of Whistler and the Pacfic Rim National Park, and more all at your fingertips.
Frommer's Vancouver & Victoria also includes gorgeous color photos of the sights and experiences that await you and a color fold-out map of Vancouver.

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The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White Review

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(More customer reviews)I loved it! "The Hustle" is a unique and intelligent book. On one level, it can be read as an intriguing tale about 10 boys - black and white, rich and poor -- who came together at age 14 to play basketball together for a season in Seattle. They won the state championship that year, and then went their separate ways. The book is an effort to find out what happened over the past two decades to these boys - how they grew into men, and whether the team, as an integration experiment, made a difference to each of their lives. The guys themselves are pretty interesting: they include a prosecutor who tried the notorious Green River Killer, a dot-com millionaire-turned hedgefund manager making a killing of Seattle's economic boom, a recovering crack addict, a weed dealer struggling to get out of the trade, a former hustler turned pentacostal minister, and a reclusive wine maker in Oregon. Tragically, one of the star players on the team was brutally murdered, which is a shock that propels the book and makes others on the team ponder their own life chances and luck.
On a deeper level, "The Hustle" can be seen as an exploration of race and class in America over the past 30 years (indeed, longer, as Merlino puts each character in a much larger historical context). Merlino uses the tales of each individual boy on the basketball team -- with all their struggles, their successes, their woes, their joys, their personal histories and families -- to open a window on a different aspect of American life during the past 20 years, all with Seattle as the backdrop: the dotcom boom and the instant millionaires, the crack era and the war on drugs, the challenges of creating a diverse community in elite schools, the struggling public education system, gentrification and its impact, and manhood in a time of economic and cultural uncertainty.
It is at once very personal, and at the same time "big picture" -- looking at the political, economic and cultural changes of the past twenty years, and how this group tries to find and define their own space as men on this shifting canvas. If you are a sports fan or played group sports as a kid, you will relate to the games and the comraderie described in the book. Even if you are not a sports fan (I like sports, but am not a massive fan), the use of the team as a tool to explore larger issues is still highly compelling.
Definitely worth a read.


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