A friend loaned me this book about a week ago and I found it to be a great read. I'm one of those wan-a-bee's "trying to leave the dock" and will begin retirement soon with a boat (trawler) in my immediate future. This book affirmed that I'm heading in the right direction to begin living my dream as soon as I can. I'll be purchasing a copy to share with friends and to read again while I'm in the water chasing whales and my own dreams in Washington State and Alaska.

Charlie's adventure is extraordinary! He lives out his dream and we get to travel with him. When I first picked up this book I thought, "Is he crazy, this boat is SO small"! After reading it, I admired him for following his dream and doing everything necessary to make it happen. His book is a real inspiration for all of us who HAVE a dream. The maps and pictures were wonderful and his style of writing was vivid and playful making it a very enjoyable read.

Hard to put down, this book is enticing and pushes me a few inches closer to the dock and out to sea. Hopefully I do and you will be reading my book next! (Today I go see a Hylas 44 to do a similar trip...)

Graduate student Annabel Mendelssohn is on a research trip to Australia where she plans to study the habits of bats. Once ensconced in the area with her fellow researchers, however, her life takes a daring turn. She takes an interest in her lead professor, John Goode, who mysteriously disappears in the midst of Annabel's research. As she decides to embark on a search mission of her own, she meets and falls in love with Goode's son, who is also searching for Goode. The novel is slightly sluggish though well written and therefore I give it three stars.

The story woven by Gwendolen Gross in Field Guide is extremely satisfying. Please, read other reviews and the book's summary to learn more about the story itself. It is the satisfaction of reading a book about a woman in science that most attracts me.

Annabel, the main character, is a woman of honor in the scientific field. Gross gives Annabel great field skills, courage, energy and dedication. I thoroughly enjoyed enduring the Australian forests, feeling the mistaken hand on a snake, smelling the bat guano...

Gross gives credibility to women in science, yet does not make them single-minded creatures of study. Annabel deals with the death of a family member that haunts her studies, attractions to others, and even some romance, yet she maintains herself as a reliable and steadfast scientist, too.

Brava!

My mother and I both loved Field Guide. She liked the human elements and the ending best. I enjoyed the beginning and appreciated most the author's description of nature and especially bats! That was the best surprise for me.

Sometimes, history is written by but a handful of individuals; that certainly was the case with the first British settlements in Australia. The term "Empire" is to some extent misleading, in that it gives an exaggerated idea of monolitihic power: the totality of the resources that the British Empire had committed to colonizing Australia in 1789 were a few decrepit ships laden with convict women and supplies, and a ragged band of half-starved colonists left on the Australian coast for over a year without any contact with the rest of the world. Sian Rees vividly evokes the vastness of the oceans separating these early settler ships from their homeland and from each other as they traveled the high seas, not encountering a soul for weeks or months at a time, and lets the reader feel the isolation of the early colonists - those on the second ship, wondering if there was even still a settlement in Australia to be reached, and those already on land, wondering if the promised relief from Great Britain would ever arrive, or if the authorities in London had forsaken them.

Unfortunately, while this book succeeds in giving one a better understanding of the general process surrounding British colonization of Australia, and the many hardships involved, this was not its primary goal and otherwise I found it lacking. It is not precisely, as the cover claims, "the true story" of the ship and its convict women, since none of the women left any written record at all of their experience. It is rather a mixture of the women's names and the crimes they were convicted of (gleaned from London criminal records) braided together with an assortment of facts from contemporary travellers' accounts, sailors' reminiscences, and other source material which gives the flavor of the period but does not directly relate to the story of the ship and its women. Far, far too many times, Sian Rees resorts to phrases including "it is possible that..." or "must have been" or "would have started" or "presumably" or "probably"... Rees does rely heavily on the published memoirs of John Nicol, a sailor on the Lady Julian; her reliance on Nicol makes it all the more jarring that she freely dismisses him whenever his memoirs contradict her assumptions, as when after quoting him dozens of times she dismisses his memory of a particular incident saying "this was in memoirs written when he was an old man, which are inaccurate in other details."

I really wanted to like this book, and the author is to be commended for trying to rescue the forgotten story of the female convicts. But this is light reading, not rigorous history, and where the documentary sources just aren't there she might have done better to write a historical novel and fictionalize freely rather than build a "non-fiction" book out of a tapestry of conditional statements.

In the foreward to this engaging narrative, Ms. Rees informs us that "when the American colonies defeated British soldiers and tax collectors, they also stopped accepting British criminals. By 1783, therefore, Britain had to find somewhere else in the world to transport its criminals." Australia was the place. Just as Jamestown, the early colony in Virginia, needed an infusion of marriageable women to allow it to grow (one of the three events of the red-letter year, 1619, was the arrival of a shipload of unmarried women), so would the penal colony in Sydney Cove.

Beginning with a description of the "crimes" for which women were sentenced to capital punishment and proceeding through the trials, prison conditions, and alternate punishment of banishment, Ms. Rees traces the voyage of the first group of women convicts to Australia. From the onset, she admits that her primary sources are limited and one, the diary of one of the crew of the Lady Julian, is somewhat doubtful because it was written so long after the fact. Even so, she has pulled together court records, contemporary British accounts of prison conditions, accounts of later voyages and other sources into a very impressive piece of research, and a very readable story.

In particular, her accounts of ship-board births, the pecking order among the female prisoners, the rights the crew assumed (both for sexual favors and for selling them in the ports of call) are fascinating reading.

An exquisitely penned and thoughtfully researched account of life in post-Revolutionary War England.

The horrific means of coping with an over-populated society included shipping women convicts to the Austrailian colonies for "crimes" ranging from hankerchief theft to manslaughter.

Disregard the title's implications. This book is a gripping account of how more than 200 women and children survived a ghastly voyage and how many emerged as heroines.

It's one of those books you don't want to end and will contemplate long after the last page is read.

This book was great. It's an interwoven story of an amazing woman. Filled with beautiful imagery I highly recommend this book.

Like spending a day in Oz. Had no intention of reading it in one sitting, but I simply could not put it down. What a journey. The tight, crisp writing had me eagerly turning pages. So seldom does a book come along that simply takes you away. This did it for me. I look forward to reading her next.

Tamara did an absolutely amazing job of making oz come alive in this recent work. The characters are alive and so believable, the story fresh and exciting, i couldnt put it down~! Tamara has definately won a fan in me with this great book.

Simply a true account of what actually happened. Honest and unbiased - a must read for anyone with an interest in the conflict.

Excellent. Of the many books I have read about the Falklands War and Goose Green and this is the most readable, informative and concise read. The book goes into great details about the individual movements of soldiers, the death of Col 'H', and the real problems they faced, quite an eye-opener. Great Maps, great narrative, couldn't put it down. I'm now looking for another book by the same author!

Great book. I truly admire the young Argentine conscripts. The majority in the Falklands fought with courage and valour. After reading Nick van der Bijl's "Nine Battles to Stanley" (Leo Cooper Limited, 1999)I have nothing but admiration for the young teenage soldiers of Colonel Mohammed Seineldin's 25th Commando-trained Regiment. No wonder it took the Paras 12 hours to crush Task Force Mercedes. Mark Adkin's book read with Bijl's book proves that conscripts can fight well in battle providing their platoon commanders are made of the right stuff. A well written book about the battle. But I must stress that it should be read along with Bijl's book who establishes that the 25th Regiment of Argentina was indeed a crack formation (the equivalent of a regiment of the Hitlerjugend during the battle for Normandy in WW2 in esprit de corps and fighting spirit).

As a two time, three island visitor to the islands of Tahiti, I did not find this book helpful because it lacks prices and it focuses on upscale lodging/food. On both trips, I've found David Stanley's TAHITI (by Moon Pub.) to be the BEST guide, providing you purchase the most recent edition, as Tahiti's hotels change with the seasons. David Stanley's guides are full of detailed maps, reviews of hikes, beaches, accomodations (from hostels to resorts), food... His advice has never steered us wrong! We owe some great travel experiences to his guide book; TAHITI by D. Stanley is the only one that you will need.

We bought 3 books and always seemed to rely on this one. Mr Kay gives great info on restaurants and hidden lodgings, which are the 2 most important topics for us. We actually stayed in one place that he labeled "hidden" and he was right! We could not find the entrance and when we did they were not open to the public, but they decided to let us stay and we were the only guests for a week. No other guide book listed this hidden lodging. Mr. Kay has a more personal approach and gives great descriptions, which the other guide books lack. And as far as not giving exact prices, it's useless to do so as these things change so much anyway. All you need to know is this: you stay in a big hotel where all the other tourists stay you will pay big money for not so much, if you venture out to where the real people live, you pay less and get better service, food, and memories.

We are planning our 2001 trip pacific south bound. Picked this book out of the several other's. Liked the cover!the "tone", and contents of the book. It envited me further in and on to the purchase line. Being prior Hawaiian residents, we have always hoped to get down to the true polynesian teritories and experiance, the "raw" and more un-americanized version of Polynesian lifestyle. Rob Kay's book truely stands out to be one of Tahiti's most informative, inspiring light's! I have found. So,thanks Rob for the Torch, it has surely helped enlighten us on our next Journey!

Unfortunately this book seems to be more of a gratitude to Mr Mairinger by the author than a dressage tutorial as one might have expected. There are too many analogies used (50 pages out of 170) to emphasize the basic and most important fact of horsemanship; "feeling of your horse" Focus on different effects and transitions is not covered thoroughly and well enough.

Although the writing style and the frequent repetition in the text sometimes distracted from getting the point that was being made, the advice and lessons within the book are well worth digging for. I found the last few chapters had the most to offer with the last couple lines of the book really summing it up.

This book wonderfully led you into the mind of a horse. It was very well written. The only reason that I rated it 4 stars intsead of five was because I did not fully agree with everything said. That is ok, it was only my opinion. This book shows you how to reconsider everything you do on a horses back, near a horse or around a horse. It does no tell you how to do something or what it might feel like, but it tells you how to get there. I loved it. Any person that is even a little interested in Horses and would like to know more, I urge you to read this book.

New Zealand has always been a natural wonder. Sired by volcanoes in the middle of an emerald sea, the land is a mixture of pastures, jagged mountains, white beaches, and tropical forests. Economically, the country is no less a marvel. It's an excellent example of how free markets create prosperity.

In 1984, New Zealand voters booted a left-leaning government and brought in a free-market-oriented government. Immediately, finance minister Sir Roger Douglas began to implement some of the most important reforms in any country of the 20th century.

Sir Douglas floated the currency, revoked all farm subsidies, abolished all import tariffs, privatized 60% of state-owned companies, fired 55% of the government workforce, placed the central bank chairman on a performance contract, revoked capital gains and inheritance taxes, and refused to print money to save reckless banks and inefficient companies from bankruptcy.

The results have been astounding. New Zealand now has one of the lowest inflation rates in the world (1.3%), seven consecutive years of budget surpluses, 6.4% unemployment (down from 12%), and a resilient, entrepreneurial economy that soared 5.8% last year.

It's the kind of country, in other words, where you can build a second home to enjoy the good life -- and end up making a fortune almost by accident as the value of the property you buy rises amidst a booming economy.

The world is getting smaller -- and New Zealand's profit potential is getting bigger.

The prospects for steady appreciation of land and investment values in New Zealand are excellent. However, it's very possible prices could rise much more sharply in a very short period of time. Here's a major reason why...

Aerospace technology is making the trip to New Zealand quicker and cheaper. Boeing 767s cost 50% less to operate than 727s. The new 777s are more efficient still. By the end of this decade, jet technology could cut travel time from California to New Zealand by as much as half -- from 11 hours to 5-1/2 hours!

Should that happen, property prices could double virtually overnight... and, over the longer run, multiply perhaps 10, 20 times or more, just as in Hawaii and California.

In the meantime, you can enjoy a bit of heaven on Earth with peaceful surroundings, friendly people, and great business and investment opportunities.

Exports are booming. With a cheaper currency, exports have grown at a 30% annual rate! However, that's not the whole story! Stronger commodity prices have helped. Remember New Zealand exports commodities like lumber, meat, dairy, wool, etc.

Business and consumer confidence is on the mend! Last year, consumer sentiment was at an all time low, which had more to do with the dissatisfaction the general population had with the newly elected Labor Government's policies than any dissatisfaction with the economic environment, but things are looking brighter on the political front these days.

Employment also chimes in as a contributing factor. The current unemployment rate stands at a 12-year low of 5.6% and the good news is that the trend upward in job postings is being driven by sectors outside agriculture and manufacturing.

So now may be the best time to read Adam Starchild's book and follow his advice, rather than waiting around to watch the economic meltdown in North America. NZ is a great place to set up your own Internet business!

This heroine is in love is when the man is married to someone else. Interesting how the author portrays the ones involved in incest, affairs and having abortions as the good guys and gals.

Yes, it was a silly romance novel, but it was very interesting historically and the most of the characters were realistic, except for the one who went to war and lost his arm, I don't remember his name. I thought it was a good book.

Finally, a character you actually won't mind reading about for hours. This book has a exciting and fast-paced story, with the people involved written well and interestingly. This book is not silly nor slow. Something of great importence to me. Well done, Ms. Bickmore!