Buying this book was vindicated last week when I had the opportunity of travelling around France for 10 days. Not knowing exactly where to go, I used the notes and colour pictures to identify potential areas of interest. Unlike many other guides this book wasn't cluttered with too much information (although I supplemented with Lonely Planet on several occasions) and had some recommended routes for travelling. The book will now double in part as a photo album as I can recognise sites previously visited. If I had to pick one book this would be it for areas of interest to see. If you require information on accomodation, places to eat this may not be the best option. As an aside some hints for future French tourists: camp sites are everywhere, go to the local tourist office and ask, many of them are sign posted as you enter towns, villages etc. Travelling on the Autoroutes is fabulous but expect to pay tolls via the peages. Arrive early to avoid the influx of tourists (of which I am admittedly one!!)

These are the best guides in the market! It is hard to believe that we are in 2001 and there are guides published with cheap paper, black and white pictures and some with no pictures at all. The National Geographic guides are perfect, with lots of usefull information and hundreds of pictures, so you have a better idea where you go and what kind of scenery you will find. Go for it if you are looking for quality.

Of all the guide books on travelling in France, i have found this one to be the most complete. It cover almost everything you would like to know about France. The maps for each area are correct and up-dated. All of recommements points are wounderful. When I told some French friends that what I have done in France with this book they are almost cry because I have been to some places even French didn't know. This book let you travel in France as easy as a bird and with their beautiful photos you really like to visit all of the places. Don't hesitate to get one before you travel in France. You will have a wouderful time there.

Being a traveller who usually swears by Lonely Planet guides, I have to admit that when it came down to taking one or the other, the Lonely Planet book stayed at home and this one made it into my backpack. It's just plain good. I will be sure to check out other Moon Guides in the future. Their series might soon be alongside my LP and Footprint Guide collections.

This may be the best guide book I have ever used. I think I should write Kerry Moran a fan letter for helping me to have an amazing and wonderful time on my six-week trip to Nepal without always feeling like a clueless tourist. This guide is so well written and interesting that I read it cover to cover during the trip-- even the sections about places we weren't planning to go. The cultural descriptions are informative and sensitively written, but not unrealistically rose-colored. The guides to towns and trekking routes give you an accurate and practical idea of what to expect when you get there without being overdetailed or bossy about telling you what do. The Nepali vocabulary and grammar in the appendix really came in handy and Nepalis, even when they could speak English, seemed genuinely pleased that I was trying to speak Nepali. The maps are not especially good, but then even with maps you would still have to ask directions. This is a great guide for anyone whose itenerary is not set in stone and who wants to get some genuine insight into Nepali culture.

This may be the best guidebook I've ever used-- I read it cover to cover during my trip, and feel like I ought to write Kerry Moran a fan letter. The advice and information in this book helped me to have an amazing and wonderful experience Nepal without always feeling like a clueless tourist. The descriptions of Nepali culture and customs are sensitively written and indespensible for a mystified first time visitor. The guides for trekking routes and towns are right on the mark but not overdetailed, so you get an accurate idea what to expect without being told exactly what to do. The Nepali vocabulary and grammar in the appendix were very handy and I really had fun trying to speak the language. This book does not have good maps, but I was able to get pretty good maps in Nepal.

Now in an updated second edition, genealogy research expert Brian Mitchell's A New Genealogical Atlas Of Ireland is a very straightforward, accessible reference, presenting maps of each Irish county. Each county has five maps: one depicting the Church of Ireland parishes, one showing the baronies and Church of Ireland dioceses, one of the poor law unions and parishes included within probate districts, one of Roman Catholic parishes and dioceses, and a fifth set of maps for the nine counties of Northern Ireland shows Presbyterian congregations. Since civil registration for everyone in Ireland didn't begin until 1864, A New Genealogical Atlas Of Ireland is an extremely useful reference for tracing ancestors who lived prior to 1864. An invaluable contribution to genealogical reference and resource materials.

Now in a new and expanded second edition, A New Genealogical Atlas Of Ireland by genealogical expert Brian Mitchell has added maps detailing the location of Roman Catholic parishes in all thirty-two counties of Ireland, and Presbyterian congregations in the nine counties of Northern Ireland. A complete geographical picture of the three major religious dominations in Ireland during the middle years of the 19th century is another newly added feature. An invaluable reference and guide for doing genealogical research for an Irish ancestry, A New Genealogical Atlas Of Ireland continues to be an indispensable, core addition to personal, professional, and genealogical society reference collections.

t' de flo' wid y

It's a crying shame that the world hosts chronic bouts of uncivil wars all over the planet, and then their atrocities vie for our attention. It's a pity that the current, most florid acts of inhumanity (via the media) hold us in thrall and divert us from the grinding pain of recovery from similar acts elsewhere. The focus on the Miedle East has distracted us from other hostilities that changed the map and twisted lives. One such conflict is the tangle of unrest among Albanians/Serbians/Bosniaks and others who share, or shared, Kosovo.

Melanie Friend has created a book of portraits (visual and verbal) that attends to the pain and confusion between 1994 and 2000 in Kosovo. Her wonderfully quiet, understated photographs do not feed the sensationalistic. They speak to the almost mundane horrors of daily living in burned out homes; hiding in sewers; trying to stay clean after escaping with only the clothes on one's back; eating only bread for an entire month; eating cherries for an entire month; occupying one's time trying to keep a refugee camp tent clean, mostly to stay busy; clinging to a shred of photograph as a talisman of hope for a loved one's survival; and surviving chronic fatiuge when one is never safe enough to sleep through an entire night.

The author's photographs are reproduced with such pristine fidelity that they are by themselves graceful studies of form, color and light. Alongside the photographs, Ms. Friend's interviewees tell their stories, narratives in the stark flatness of truth as they experience it. They don't philosophize particularly, nor do they bang their political drums particularly, although I'm sure all cherish their personal philosophies and have political perspectives. They describe what happened to them, their families, and their homes. All were victimized. The speakers survived, but none have recovered.

You will not see a single severed limb, starving child, or mangled body in the book. The book will not burden you with the type of content that increases your anxiety or "compassion fatigue" to the degree that you must turn away. Instead, in quietude, the author gives you a current history of Kosovo's war and its aftermath with respect and sadness.

"No Place Like Home" is an elegant book that informs by taking one in and quietly personalizing the experience of war in one's homeland rather than beating the reader into insensibility with atrocities so graphic that one must tune out. It is a thoughtful, painful, gentle response to victims of war.

Photographs and text: Wonderful!

This is a fantastic book! It completely transports the reader into the lives and experiences of the people of Kosovo. They are elegantly and honestly portrayed through Friend's unique choice of medium. She juxtaposes stunning photographs and gripping testimonies of her subjects, inspiring compassion and awe from her audience. Having a degree in International Relations, I found this book offered an insightful and fresh perspective on the situation in the Balkans, while remaining accessible to a wide audience. Beautiful!

This is a book about war unlike any other. You are drawn in by the photographs and, somehow, the voices of the ordinary civilians telling you about their lives under the years of repression, the war, the flight from their homes and their return to the devastated towns and villages hit you with remarkable poignancy. The juxtaposition of these extraordinary photographs and the testimonies is truly remarkable. This is not only great documentary photography, it is also one of the most articulate and profound book about war I've ever read. Kudos to Melanie Friend! Very highly recommended!

This is a well written, well researched text which includes a great deal of material drawn from the author's own notes, taken as a reporter inside Germany and a number of Eastern countries just prior to the outbreak of World War II. Like his contemporary, William Shirer, Leonard Mosley brings a professional eye to the major events of the period leading up to the start of the war, and the fact that he was often sur place, gives the book a most authentic ring. The book raises a number of seemingly minor but possibly vital questions such as: would Hitler's attitude to Chamberlain have been different had the British P.M. not turned up in Berchtesgarden with a staff of only four people? Certainly he began to develop a degree of contempt for Chamberlain from that meeting onward, and when it came time for the fateful meeting on the Rhine some months later, Hitler was openly contemptuous of the British P.M.

Would things have also been different had the Czechoslovakian President, Eduard Benes, had more sleep just prior to the events of September 1938? Would he have seen things more clearly and called in the Russians, as he probably should have done (and, it is believed, nearly did do)? And would it not have been much more favourable for the British and French to fight Germany with Czechoslovakia in 1938, than without her in 1939? Mosley is very good at asking these sorts of questions, which, so many years later, may prove to have been very decisive indeed.

How many odd events seemed to influence the mood of the leaders of that time. How many messages failed to get through to the right place. Sometimes they were inexplicably held up en route (Mosley suggests it may have been due, on occasions, to Communist spies in the British Secret Service - like Donald McLean). At other times, well placed people (like Paul Stehlin, the French Air Attaché in Berlin), tried to warn their governments repeatedly that things were hotting up, but were not taken seriously. As for the extraordinary series of errors committed by the Anglo-French military and political delegations to Moscow just prior to the invasion of Poland, Mosley covers them in detail and highlights many points hitherto overlooked.

These and many other forgotten issues probably exerted a far greater influence at the time than has been thought since. Yet in the end, it was the personality of Adolf Hitler himself, although set off and to some extent complemented in exactly the wrong way by the French and British leaders of the period (and one might add, the Italian), which proved decisive. From the very start, it was undoubtedly Hitler's war, and Mosley brings this historical imperative more firmly into the light of day than ever. It nevertheless leaves one quite breathless, to see in detail how it all came about.

Of all the books I have read about this period, On Borrowed Time, is without a doubt the best. Well written, tension filled and full of outrage. This book explains how the democratic states lost their way in the shadow of Hitler's evil. Highly recommended.

This book is about the lead up to World War Two in Europe. It details much that went on in Europe from the rise of Nazism in Germany, thru the secret pact between Germany and the U.S.S.R. to divide Poland, to the beginning of the war itself. It details many of the problems with the governments of Poland, France, and Britian that allowed them to think that agreements with Hitler would be more than the paper they were written on.

Good book. If you can find it.

ASIN -0192158422 Anybody can receive this book within a week or two. On Stalin and Stalinism is a book that I strongly recommend for anyone that is interested about the Russian Revolution and the conflicts it brought over who would have the most power between the key leaders including Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Medvedev examined first-hand stories from survivers of the Stalin Era, secret letters sent amongst government officials, and personal quotations that provided an insight to who these Soviet leaders were really like. The majority of the book was spent on the reasons why Stalin inflicted torture on innocent people. Their was never a boring part in the book but instead it kept me wanting to read more. Anybody who reads this book will gain an enormous amount of information about behind the scenes of the Communist Party. Instead of having his own opinion throughout the book, Medvedev was able to have a range of materials at his disposal since he is a Soviet author. If any student has to do a report on Stalin or is just in a mood to read a remarkable book then On Stalin and Stalinism is they novel for you.

Anybody can receive this book within a week or two. On Stalin and Stalinism is a book that I strongly recommend for anyone that is interested about the Russian Revolution and the conflicts it brought over who would have the most power between the key leaders including Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Medvedev examined first-hand stories from survivers of the Stalin Era, secret letters sent amongst government officials, and personal quotations that provided an insight to who these Soviet leaders were really like. The majority of the book was spent on the reasons why Stalin inflicted torture on innocent people. Their was never a boring part in the book but instead it kept me wanting to read more. Anybody who reads this book will gain an enormous amount of information about behind the scenes of the Communist Party. Instead of having his own opinion throughout the book, Medvedev was able to have a range of materials at his disposal since he is a Soviet author. If any student has to do a report on Stalin or is just in a mood to read a remarkable book then On Stalin and Stalinism is they novel for you.

On Stalin and Stalinism is a book that I strongly recommend for anyone that is interested about the Russian Revolution and the conflicts it brought over who would have the most power between the key leaders including Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Medvedev examined first-hand stories from survivers of the Stalin Era, secret letters sent amongst government officials, and personal quotations that provided an insight to who these Soviet leaders were really like. The majority of the book was spent on the reasons why Stalin inflicted torture on innocent people. Their was never a boring part in the book but instead it kept me wanting to read more. Anybody who reads this book will gain an enormous amount of information about behind the scenes of the Communist Party. Instead of having his own opinion throughout the book, Medvedev was able to have a range of materials at his disposal since he is a Soviet author. If any student has to do a report on Stalin or is just in a mood to read a remarkable book then On Stalin and Stalinism is they novel for you.

As I listened to Mrs. Stalcup's book, "On the Home Front," I was sucked into a world of Spitfires, Hurricane Bombers, and the Little Ships bringing soldiers from Dunkirk to Dover. Tears were shed when soldiers were lost in battle, and there was rejoicing when a major battle was won. I saw blood, I saw tears, and I saw glory.

It was quite an experience for my classmates and me. We had an author reading her book. Sometimes she would choose a student to read certain chapters because they were so emotional for her, such as the Little Ships and the Spitfire Funds.

It was an amazing book about a young girl who was living during World War Two. But the most amazing paart about it was who was reading it - the little girl from the book!!!!!

Stalcup shares her memoir of growing up in the town of Lydney, England, during World War 11. Ann stays with her parents and experiences war as it comes to her community with evacuees, German prisoners, Australian food packages, and American soldiers. Short, succinct chapters, enhanced by personal and archival photographs, make this a book to be savored as a read aloud or when read independently. Stalcup imparts the flavors of every day English life such as four o'clock tea, sweets, walks in the country, and the pleasures of a front garden, and how they are changed by a world at war. She retells moments of her life, from the age of three in 1938 with her first gas mask to V.E. Day in 1945. This factual memoir complements historical fiction titles such as Pearson's The Sky is Falling, Bawden's Carrie's War, Heneghan's Wish Me Luck, and Garrigue's All the Children Were Sent Away. Stalcup takes the reader's heart and mind into various events sharing humor, fear, courage, and community spirit. Thoroughly researched facts in combination with thoughtfully remembered experiences, make this compelling account a great starting point for curriculum dealing with war and a welcome addition to children's and youth's nonfiction collections. This first book of Stalcup's shows the beginning of a new children's writer with great potential.

As Juvenile Literature, I suppose the book isn't bad in terms of its approach; as any sort of history, however, even for the American market, it falls well short because it's riddled with errors of fact and perception. This, despite the uncredited, but apparently heavy, reliance on Angus Calder's "The People's War" (Cape, 1969). It's no defence to claim "this is what I remembered" if the book purports to be a picture of "Growing Up in Wartime England." A better sub-title would have been "the middle-aged memoirs of a sheltered little girl." Stalcup is 20 days older than me and what I remember of WW2 in Britain is somewhat different.

In 1918 fully 85% of Ireland voted for Sinn Fein, the party of Irish independence from Britain. We don't hear much about this vote or the British reaction to it--overturning the election, bombing parliament, jailing the newly elected representatives as well as many others. McAliskey tells us about this as well as about the British policy of internment without trial (which reminds us of the current policy of jailing immigrants). After reading this pamphlet you will see why Jerry Adams and the current Sinn Fein play such an important role in the world, despite ceaseless slander against Irish republicanism.

Ireland is about continued British colonialism, not religion. Ireland is about hundreds of years of struggle, not incurable hatred. Irelands rounds of struggle continue as does Britain's attempt to hold on. Devlin here is concise, accurate, and gets it all in with very few worlds. A good short introduction to the realities of the Irish struggle.

Excellent source of historical information. I saw Devlin give a speech once in the early 80s in Montreal. Also the text of a public presentation, this short pamphlet has the same qualities I remember: relaxed, knowledgeable discourse, great breadth of understanding, amused and amusing - and an unshakeable conviction that Ireland will be united. Fascinating detail on Irish history. When she explains how London ignored a perfectly democratic Irish vote in 1918 for independence and launched a civil war, you can't help but agree that Sinn Fein has truth and justice on its side today! Her Ireland is coloured by the 1960s civil rights movement in the US, draws strength from the World War I protesters in Ireland who refused conscription, saying they would fight "for neither king nor kaiser," and has never stopped pushing to be free. Makes perfectly clear why London is going to have to give Ireland back to its citizens, whether it likes it or not.

Travelers tales are amongst my favourite reading, so I was delighted to find Alan Behr's dry humored account of his travels in the "chocolate belt" in Europe. As a recent bachelor, and still very cautious of involvement, Behr revisits his old travel haunts, casually giving us the pleasure of some wonderfully crafted writing and the benefit of his extensive research of local history.

Despite his family having to flee war torn Europe in the late 30's, Behr feels strongly connected to his German roots and writes affectionately and knowledgeably about the country. I found this particularly interesting as I was born in Germany, but had previously only heard disparaging stories about the country as my family suffered under the Nazi reign. Feeling Behr's connection, added another dimension and opened some doors on my rather narrow view.

Some of Behr's sexual dalliances made me wonder in which direction the story was heading, but the tale gains great warmth and depth when Alan meets Julie, the real love interest.Together they go traveling back to Europe and into exploring their emotions. It all makes for compulsive reading!

We are a couple of post peak yuppies who work too much and spend the best moments of our lives travelling.

Alan Behr's very insighful observations are well wrought , highly entertaining and even profound. The book also provides legitimate historical information thaat goes far beyond most tourist guides. But for us, the best aspect of his book is his depiction of the conquest of love and discovery of self through travel in the European settings that we both know so well.

The only minor note is that the book could use an index, to navigate more easily from city to city.

For anyone who loves Europe, travelling, or just loving his/her partner and trying to figure out the meaning of our voyage in life, this book is a delightful companion.

Once around the fountain book review
November 25, 2001

I have always enjoyed travel accounts written by writers in their thirties and forties because at this time in their lives, most writers (at least the good ones) bring just the right amount of own personal baggage along. In other words, if they tell it right, there is an interesting balance of give and take--sometimes the travel writer changes the landscape and sometimes the landscape changes him.

As I result, I enjoyed reading the mature but unjaded observations of travel writer/ attorney Alan Behr. He writes about a decade of European travel that begins in his early thirties and ends in his early forties. He begins his travels as a bachelor and there is a sexual "give and take" as he has an affair with a destitute but resourceful young chambermaid in Budapest--and rejects the advances of a wealthy, less resourceful dowager he meets at a café in Portofino.

Mid-way through his memoirs, he cautiously starts to travel with Julie Hackett, a New York fashion consultant, whom he quickly realizes is "the one." Julie turns out to be an energetic and enthusiastic traveler and the give and take continues, sometimes romantically, and sometimes, literally, as Behr tracks down a pair of white pants that Julie leaves behind in a hotel room. While at first they squabble over driving and navigation, soon Alan and Julie are traveling as a finely tuned pair, even coordinating efforts to save and travel with an unwieldy pineapple left from a hotel gift basket.

This book educates as it amuses. Behr, currently a New Yorker by way of New Orleans, is descended from a family forced to flee Germany during World War II. His German roots run so deep, that he holds dual American and German citizenships-and has the passports to prove it. As a result, he is at his best describing Germany- and we learn a great deal about German architecture and history, as well as the nature of its people.

Behr describes the cathedral of Cologne, which has withstood World War II bombers and an earthquake, writing that it "towers above a city rebuilt on the quick by the lowest bidder, a Gothic thumb in the modernist eye."

On a Sunday at dawn at Hamburg's open-air fish market, he sees "bacchants and churchgoers contentedly carried away swaddled fish and tubs filled with houseplants rumored to be Dutch and disease-ridden."

This book reminds me of another that I enjoyed-- New Yorker Adam Gopnik's book Paris to the Moon-even though Gopnik stayed in one place and Behr moves around. In both cases, however, these books on European lifestyle and travel are more about people than they are about places and things.

Highly recommended!