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"World Atlas" - A Book
to Treasure!
Book Review
Grand in size, ambitious in scope, relatively
inexpensive in price, "World Atlas" edited by Andrew Heritage (DK
Publishing, $50.00, 354 over-sized pages) is a treasure chest of
information spread over 90,000 entries.
The book is at once a collectible and a user friendly guide to the world.
It has over 450 detailed maps of every region in the world, nearly a
thousand full color photographs. There are diagrams, 3D terrain models, 8
gatefold maps, over 96 large-scale regional maps, 200 terrain models. For
information acquiring, for browsing, for traveler, students, browsers,
"Bungalow Nation" by Diana Maddex and Alexander Vertikoff (Abrams,
$35,00, 240 pages, 350 full color photos) is the entertaining and
enlightening story of 75 bungalows in Los Angeles, Seattle,
Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago and Washington, D.C. These dwelling were
constructed at the start of the 20th century for those seeking affordable
and solid single-family homes. The impact of the people of these dwelling
and the homes on the people is a rich time trip in American culture.
Just the book for those cold winter nights this
winter - - "Running with Reindeer" by Roger Took (West View Press/Perseus,
$27.50, 365 pages) - - is gripping, entertaining and unusual. Took, an art
historian and curator, goes into vivid detail of his adventures and
encounters in Russian Lapland. A special interest section for me was his
description of time spent with the Saami people deep in the artic
forests.
On the stands now is a new account of Oscar Wilde
in court that is a gripping tale of that world famous Queensberry trial.
"The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde" with an intro and commentary by Merlin
Holland (Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, $27.95, 334 pages) is billed as the
first uncensored account of that trial of Wilde versus John Douglas (Marquess
of Queensberry in 1895. It is everything it is billed as and gives us a
real sense of Wilde's speech, that time and place. A top read.
**MOST NOTABLE: "Sepharad" by Antonio Muñoz
Molina (Harcourt, $27.00, 400 pages) is a gem of a book. It is part
fiction, part memoir, part historical tract. Meshed together are the
Sepahardic diaspora, the Holocaust and the purges of Stalin. As authors
who have written in some depth on Jewish culture and Spain - this book had
a remarkable resonance for us.
BOOKENDS: "Eyewitness London" (DK Publishing,
$9.95, 192 pages) is the one "must have" take along for your guide to the
ten best of everything in the UK's best city.
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About the
Authors: Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer are a wife and husband team who
successfully bridge the worlds of popular culture and traditional scholarship.
Co-authors of the critically acclaimed interactive oral histories It Happened in
the Catskills, It Happened in Brooklyn, Growing Up Jewish in America, It
Happened on Broadway, and It Happened in Manhattan, they teach what they
practice as professors at Dartmouth College.
They are also travel writers who specialize in luxury properties and fine dining
as well as cultural history and Jewish history and heritage in the United
States, Europe, and the Caribbean. (More
about these authors.)
You can contact the Frommers at:
Email: myrna.frommer@Dartmouth.EDU
(myrna frommer)
Email: harvey.frommer@dartmouth.edu
Web:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~frommer/travel.htm.
This Article is Copyright © 1995 - 2010 by Harvey and Myrna Frommer. All rights
reserved worldwide.
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