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Amazon.com Review : "The awful thing about life is this:" says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. "Everyone has his reasons." That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since . Happy to say, it's very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues--among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock'n'roll--and in some ways can't be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them. --Tom Nissley From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Nine years after winning the National Book Award, Franzen's The Corrections consistently appears on "Best of the Decade" lists and continues to enjoy a popularity that borders on the epochal, so much so that the first question facing Franzen's feverishly awaited follow-up is whether it can find its own voice in its predecessor's shadow. In short: yes, it does, and in a big way. Readers will recognize the strains of suburban tragedy afflicting St. Paul, Minn.'s Walter and Patty Berglund, once-gleaming gentrifiers now marred in the eyes of the community by Patty's increasingly erratic war on the right-wing neighbors with whom her eerily independent and sexually precocious teenage son, Joey, is besot, and, later, "greener than Greenpeace" Walter's well-publicized dealings with the coal industry's efforts to demolish a West Virginia mountaintop. The surprise is that the Berglunds' fall is outlined almost entirely in the novel's first 30 pages, freeing Franzen to delve into Patty's affluent East Coast girlhood, her sexual assault at the hands of a well-connected senior, doomed career as a college basketball star, and the long-running love triangle between Patty, Walter, and Walter's best friend, the budding rock star Richard Katz. By 2004, these combustible elements give rise to a host of modern predicaments: Richard, after a brief peak, is now washed up, living in Jersey City, laboring as a deck builder for Tribeca yuppies, and still eyeing Patty. The ever-scheming Joey gets in over his head with psychotically dedicated high school sweetheart and as a sub-subcontractor in the re-building of postinvasion Iraq. Walter's many moral compromises, which have grown to include shady dealings with Bush-Cheney cronies (not to mention the carnal intentions of his assistant, Lalitha), are taxing him to the breaking point. Patty, meanwhile, has descended into a morass of depression and self-loathing, and is considering breast augmentation when not working on her therapist-recommended autobiography. Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family's facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at--incredibly--genuine hope. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Amazon.com Review : There is, as everyone knows, no place in the world changing as fast, and at such scale, as China. Accounts of the upheaval can be breathless and even alarming, but Peter Hessler is the calmest and most companionable of correspondents. In his reporting for the New Yorker and in his books River Town, Oracle Bones, and now the superb Country Driving, he's observed the past 15 years of change with the patience and perspective--and necessary good humor--of an outsider who expects to be there for a while. In Country Driving, Hessler takes to the roads, as so many Chinese are doing now for the first time, driving on dirt tracks to the desert edges of the ancient empire and on brand-new highways to the mushrooming factory towns of the globalized boom. He's modest but intrepid--having taken to heart the national philosophy that it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission--and an utterly enjoyable guide, with a humane and empathetic eye for the ambitions, the failures, and the comedy of a country in which everybody, it seems, is on the move, and no one is quite sure of the rules. --Tom Nissley From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In his latest feat of penetrating social reportage, New Yorker writer Hessler (Oracle Bones) again proves himself America's keenest observer of the New China. Hessler investigates the country's lurch into modernity through three engrossing narratives. In an epic road trip following the Great Wall across northern China, he surveys dilapidated frontier outposts from the imperial past while barely surviving the advent of the nation's uniquely terrifying car culture. He probes the transformation of village life through the saga of a family of peasants trying to remake themselves as middle-class entrepreneurs. Finally, he explores China's frantic industrialization, embodied by the managers and workers at a fly-by-night bra-parts factory in a Special Economic Zone. Hessler has a sharp eye for contradictions, from the absurdities of Chinese drivers' education courses—low-speed obstacle courses are mandatory, while seat belts and turn signals are deemed optional—to the leveling of an entire mountain to make way for the Renli Environmental Protection Company. Better yet, he has a knack for finding the human-scale stories that make China's vast upheavals both comprehensible and moving. The result is a fascinating portrait of a society tearing off into the future with only the sketchiest of maps. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly In a gripping account, Millard focuses on an episode in Teddy Roosevelt's search for adventure that nearly came to a disastrous end. A year after Roosevelt lost a third-party bid for the White House in 1912, he decided to chase away his blues by accepting an invitation for a South American trip that quickly evolved into an ill-prepared journey down an unexplored tributary of the Amazon known as the River of Doubt. The small group, including T.R.'s son Kermit, was hampered by the failure to pack enough supplies and the absence of canoes sturdy enough for the river's rapids. An injury Roosevelt sustained became infected with flesh-eating bacteria and left the ex-president so weak that, at his lowest moment, he told Kermit to leave him to die in the rainforest. Millard, a former staff writer for National Geographic, nails the suspense element of this story perfectly, but equally important to her success is the marvelous amount of detail she provides on the wildlife that Roosevelt and his fellow explorers encountered on their journey, as well as the cannibalistic indigenous tribe that stalked them much of the way. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the edition. From Every critic enjoyed Millard’s yarn about an ex-president’s fervent desire for adventure and self-acceptance. By focusing on the vivid details of Roosevelt’s journey to the Amazon as well as his relationship with his son, Millard creates much more than your typical ho-hum adventure. The beauty of this story is not just that Roosevelt’s rich history could spawn a thousand adventure stories, but that Millard’s experience with National Geographic is evident in her beautiful scenic descriptions and grisly depictions of the Amazon’s man-eating catfish, ferocious piranhas, white-water rapids, and prospect of starvation. A story deep in symbolism and thick with research, Millard succeeds where many have not; she has managed to contain a little bit of Teddy Roosevelt’s energy and warm interactions between the covers of her wonderful new book. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the edition.

Review This is a splendid book. It is a scientific treatise on primate sex and status, successfully masquerading as a good read. --Alison Jolly (American Scientist 20070601) The bulk of the book represents an attempt to create a perspective on the evolutionary biology of women by evaluating their female primate heritage. These chapters are original, high quality formulations presenting and explaining the behavior of female primates using a combination of sociobiological and socioecological principles of analysis...The book is written toward a borderline between the scientific and the popular audience--not an easy thing to do--but, by and large, Hrdy does just that. For this reason, the book has a place in both research and teaching. --Jane B. Lancaster (American Journal of Physical Anthropology ) It is an understatement to say that this is a provocative essay. Although the book is written for a general audience, it will compel specialists to reconsider many of their assumptions about the evolution of primate females. Those interested in evolutionary influences upon human social behavior will be stimulated and challenged. Undoubtedly, many of the hypotheses will be controversial, and some may be disturbing. --Joan B. Silk (Ethnology and Sociology ) In its treatment of primate behavior, Hrdy's book has no peers...[It is] a fascinating account of the selective pressures that have shaped the behavior of males and females. --Dorothy Cheney (Science ) [A] breakthrough book...A primatologist by training and feminist by predilection, Hrdy asked the basic and in my mind perfectly sensible question: How do women compare to other female primates? What can we understand about our urges, desires, and fears, our sexuality, our relationships with men and with other women, and the near universality of women's second-class status, by examining the lives and loves of our closest nonhuman kin? Among Hrdy's many bracing conclusions: Far from being coy and sexually tepid, as the stereotype has it, women may well have evolved for a restless sort of promiscuity, the better to confuse issues of paternity and thus heighten their children's chances of survival in the hazardous, half-cocked company of men. --Natalie Angier (O Magazine ) From the Back Cover This is a splendid book. It is a scientific treatise on primate sex and status, successfully masquerading as a good read. (Alison Jolly, American Scientist)

Review "A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because Vanderbilt is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader." - Los Angeles Times "A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life." - Greil Marcus, Bookforum "A fascinating political and cultural analysis of 'cold war architecture': a vast array of structures from missile silos to small towns built to test the effectiveness of an atomic blast, presidential fallout shelters, nuclear waste dumps, monoliths like the windowless PacBell building in Los Angeles, and countless motels and diners named 'Atomic.'" - Publishers Weekly "Exploring buried traces of the cold war in America... Vanderbilt finds a vast, secret, and now largely abandoned landscape." - Architecture "Survival City, by taking us on a tour of important places we've probably never seen, is both a call to preserve cold war history and a valuable reminder of the continual impact of nuclear weapons on the American cultural and physical landscape." - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists "This is a crucial and dazzling book. Masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating. It reminds us of the absurd and sinister ways humans have attempted to ensure their survival, and, without ever oversimplifying, it manages to be a ridiculously entertaining read." - Dave Eggers. About the Author Tom Vanderbilt is the New York Times best-selling author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). His work on design, technology, science, and culture has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, the London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and others. 

From the Back Cover 16 Self-guided Tours. 33 Maps. One Great Trip. At last, a travel guide that tells you how to see the best of everything—in the smartest, most time-efficient way. The best of Oahu in three days, one week, or two weeks Thematic tours for every interest, schedule, and taste Walking Tours of the city's best-loved neighborhoods Hundreds of evocative color photos Bulleted maps that show you how to get from place to place Hotels, restaurants, shopping, and nightlife for all budgets A tear-resistant foldout map—enclosed in a handy plastic wallet you can also use for tickets and souvenirs Frommer's. The best trips start here. Visit us online at Frommers.com About the Author A resident of the Big Island, Jeanette Foster has skied the slopes of Mauna Kea—during a Fourth of July ski meet, no less—and gone scuba diving with manta rays off the Kona Coast. A prolific writer widely published in travel, sports, and adventure magazines, she's also a contributing editor to Hawaii magazine, the editor of Zagat's Survey to Hawaii's Top Restaurants, and the Hawaii chapter author of 1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. and Canada Before You Die. In addition to writing this guide, Jeanette is the author of Frommer's Hawaii 2011; Frommer's Maui 2011; Frommer's Kauai; Frommer's Hawaii with Kids; Frommer's Honolulu, Waikiki & Oahu; Frommer's Hawaii Day by Day; and Frommer's Maui Day by Day. --This text refers to an alternate edition.

From the Back Cover Put the Best of Turks & Caicos in Your Pocket Insider tips on white-sand beaches, world-class scuba diving and snorkeling, sunset cruises, activities for kids, and more.Outspoken opinions on what's worth your time and what's not.Exact prices, so you can plan the perfect trip no matter what your budget.Off-the-beaten-path experiences and undiscovered gems, plus new takes on top attractions.The best hotels and restaurants in every price range, with candid reviews. Frommer's. The best trips start here. Experience a place the way the locals do. Enjoy the best it has to offer. And avoid tourist traps. At Frommer's, we use 150 outspoken travel experts around the world to help you make the right choices. Find great deals and book your trip at Frommers.com About the Author Alexis Lipsitz Flippin is a freelance writer and former Frommer’s Senior Editor. She has written and edited for consumer magazines such as Self, American Health, and Rolling Stone and was an editor for Reader’s Digest General Books.

Amazon.com Review From Antarctica to Zimbabwe, if you're going there, chances are Lonely Planet has been there first. With a pithy and matter-of-fact writing style, these guides are guaranteed to calm the nerves of first-time world travelers, while still listing off-the-beaten-path finds sure to thrill even the most jaded globetrotters. Lonely Planet has been perfecting its guidebooks for nearly 30 years and as a result, has the experience and know-how similar to an older sibling's "been there" advice. The original backpacker's bible, the LP series has recently widened its reach. While still giving insights for the low-budget traveler, the books now list a wide range of accommodations and itineraries for those with less time than money. Considered the Bible of East African travel, this LP guide offers useful critiques of places to eat and stay--from camping and cooking your own grub to offerings in high-end hotels; advises you on how to choose an organized safari or plan your own; provides national park essentials; offers details on Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya treks; and will get you interacting with the locals by way of its helpful Swahili language section. With useful background on the region's diverse people, cultures, and politics, the book also contains an excellent 32-page color wildlife guide with creatures ranging from bongos to baboons. --Kathryn True --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Best for curious and independent-minded travelers' --Wall Street Journal

Review The book is presented in a clear and engaging manner and I would recommend it as a useful undergraduate text as well as for the general reader.–The Sociological Review Every now and again, a book comes along which fills in the crevices of one's knowledge and appreciation for a topic. Such was the case in my reading of this edited volume, which I found not only pleasurable, but also a genuine contribution to my understanding and views of culture as a product of tourist consumption.–Steven C. Dinero, Journal of Cultural Geography

From the Back Cover 17 Self-guided Tours. 43 Maps. One Great Trip. At last, a travel guide that tells you how to see the best of everything—in the smartest, most time-efficient way.The best of Maui in three days, one week, or two weeksThematic tours for every interest, schedule, and tasteDriving tours that visit the island's most scenic roads and townsHundreds of evocative color photosBulleted maps that show you how to go from place to placeHotels, restaurants, shopping, and nightlife for all budgetsA tear-resistant foldout map—enclosed in a handy plastic wallet you can also use for tickets and souvenirs Frommer's. The best trips start here. Visit us online at Frommers.com About the Author A resident of the Big Island, Jeanette Foster has skied the slopes of Mauna Kea—during a Fourth of July ski meet, no less—and gone scuba diving with manta rays off the Kona Coast. A prolific writer widely published in travel, sports, and adventure magazines, she’s also a contributing editor to Hawaii magazine, the editor of Zagat’s Survey to Hawaii’s Top Restaurants, and the Hawaii chapter author of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die in the U.S. and Canada. In addition to writing this guide, Jeanette is the author of Frommer’s Hawaii, Frommer’s Hawaii from $80 a Day, Frommer’s Kauai, Frommer’s Hawaii with Kids, Frommer’s Portable Big Island, and Frommer’s Honolulu, Waikiki & Oahu.