I purchased this book on the recommendation of our travel agent. It is very disappointing. There is no information about any wildlife parks, such as the Koala Park near Sydney and others. I found much more information on the Internet. The companion book (the map book) may be more helpful - the map part - but it is very large and difficult to refold. I expect books for tourists to have information about areas to tour - and in Australia I think that wildlife parks must be mentioned. It is possible that the Internet will take over for travel books if writers don't provide information that tourists need.

As a student traveling abroad for the 1st time with a delegation, this book has proved esential. Although I had other travel guides with me, this book was in constant use. The superb maps and pictures of my destination proved themselves as our group didn't get lost once. This guide is packed with information and i recomend it to anyone of any age. After my trip I continue reading this guide for more information, and I hope to go there again soon. 2 enthusiastic thumbs up

As an Australian, I recommend this for its accuracy and good, straightforward coverage of the country. It is annoying to read inaccuracies and clangers about your own country, and it is pleasing to note that this guide avoids that.

I have written in very glowing terms also about the Sydney guide.

These are guidebooks I prefer to use in travelling my own country, which is a great recommendation.

This would have been better as a novella or a short story. Evocatively written, Falconer nevertheless overwhelms the reader with fanciful yet strangely cold prose. The writing is all too clearly the product of intense labour, earnestly wrought, then wrought again and again and again. Clarity and simplicity are abandoned in the pursuit of hyperbole and in the end, the book is as insubstantial as fairy floss. Falconer could do better than this. Good writing should make the heart sing with pleasure at the apt word, the well chosen single phrase. This attenuated whimsy substitutes an infatuation with words for real meaning.

That a writer whose youth is still an issue ("Australia's most celebrated young writer") is capable of prose this lush and evocative is surely a testament to the splendid work being done by Australia's writers in all genres. Delia Falconer is an exquisite stylist. Her prose, like her characters, climbs to dazzling heights and takes risks many established writers would avoid. However, even with images and other sensory stimulants packed to bursting on every page, the novel lacks an emotional punch. Her narrator, Eureka Jones, a young woman coming of age early in this century in the magical landscape around Australia's Blue Mountains, remains frustratingly remote from the reader. Her voice is cool and precise. The object of her affection, the photographer Harry Kitchings, is a whispy, elusive figure whose various tics and eccentricities never develop a human face. The narrative is woven around both imaginary and actual events, giving the book an aura of an historical fantasy. But it is much more accomplished than that. Read it for the simple joy of witnessing a writer's love of language and image. But don't expect a story that will take your breath away.

Delia Falconer has written a brilliant first novel here in The Service of Clouds. I do not think this book has received the attention it deserves. There is no great storyline but the writing and the prose are heavenly.
Living in Australia I well know the Blue Mountains, which are to the west of Sydney, and they are a place of inspiring beauty. This is reflected in Delia's writing which is wonderfully descriptive.

Delia's observations of life, human nature and love are illuminating and magically alluring. This is a novel which may appeal to men as much as, if not more than, women. When I first read the blurbs I thought this might not be the book for me. I took the chance and it was. I reread The Service of Clouds recently and was even more impressed.

If you like Donna Tartt's writing you will love this novel. Delia is right up there in her ability to make you feel you are living with the characters in their hearts and lives. Such is the power of the time stopping qualities of her exquisitely distilled prose.

The prequel to the award-winning Praise, this book is marginally better than that empty outing. The plot has all kinds of interesting possibilities: two 21ish guys (one painter, one writer) who just met decide to take a 6-month job as weather observers on a national park out in the middle of nowhere. But not much happens to the two losers since they don't make any effort to do anything except get drunk and stoned all the time. There's no great conflict, no insights gained, and perhaps that is the point Mcgahan is trying to make about that generation of Australian youth. Or at least a certain segment of them. Either way, there's got to be a more interesting way of making the point.

Andrew McGahan won the Vogel Award (Australia's most well-known award for previously unpublished young writers)for "Praise" but I think 1988, the subsequent prequel, is much better. I was really surprised at the number of negative reviews essentially saying this book was eventless, meaningless and a waste of time. 1988 is not written in a style that is easy to swallow: McGahan's writes flat, almost ugly prose that is distinctly "anti-literary", and it seems like a lot of readers haven't been able to get beyond that. But you can't confuse a character's meaningless existence with a meaningless novel.I guess the written word carries a certain aesthetic responsibility that the spoken work doesn't. We expect the language of novels to have some kind of "beauty". Bret Easton Ellis started to challenge some of these expectations and got a lot of criticism for it. But even Ellis' so-called "anti-glamour" approach is highly stylised.McGahan however, writes like someone would speak -or at least how his characters would speak. Plain language. It's not something we're used to in novels - we expect imagery, metaphors, some kind of artistic take on the uglier aspects of life. But McGahan refuses to give us that - boredom, inadequacy, lack of ambition - he shows it as it is and refuses to glamourise it. Nor does he condemn it. That's the strength of this book - it's not a moral judgement on the twenty-something generation but it's not about mindless amorality. I loved the way it was written - refreshingly unpretentious, and funny too. I was surprised no-one else mentioned there is a real humour in this book. It's subtle and deadpan but maybe not that easy to pick up. I also wondered to what extent the ability to enjoy this book was a cultural thing. I noticed that most of the people who didn't get anything out of it were not from Australia, whereas most of those who loved it, were.

I think other reviewers are over-analysing this book - perhaps they don't "get it"? 1988 was the bi-centenial year for Australia. Instead of celebrating it, these two guys decide to leave the city and take a job in one of the most remote parts of the country! Great idea! or so it seems.

I found this book very funny, and have bought it as a present for friends who loved it. Praise (also by McGahan and now a Film) has a much "darker" humour, but is just as "real life". 1988 is not set in the Outback, as other reviewers have said. It's set in the far north of Australia, on the coast. This environment is quite different, and interesting as a predicament. The fact that it is so isolated is what makes 1988 so funny.

I suspect the humour in 1988 just doesn't translate very well. And that's ok.

Comparisons to Salinger don't make sense to me. This is no Catcher in the Rye (1951). It's Australia today. A closer comparison might be John Birmingham's The Tasmanian Babe Fiasco, another Australian writer with a contemporary-Brisbane focus.

I've just started reading McGahan's third Book "Last Drinks". It's very good too. His first fictional work, set around the Brisbane Inquiry into official corruption.

As a resident of Bali year-round, the number one complaint by almost every lonely planet carrying visitor is how inaccurate and outdated the lonely planet guides are. Whether it is Thailand or Indonesia, information that is needed on a daily basis is history by the time the lonely books reach the traveling consumer. Bookstores throughout Asia are piled high with lonely planets discarded by weary travelers eager to lessen their load. Lonely planet books do offer historical perspectives that can also be found on the internet, but the insider's information the first time traveler needs to save money and sanity their first days in Asia is sorely lacking. Updated info on how to avoid being ripped off from lodging to transportation to moneychanging is of primary concern to almost all visitors to Bali that we meet. Books as heavy as bricks with pretty pics are nice but hardly handy when you are in need of fast, accurate information. Try "The Beginners Guide to Bali" on cd-rom- it has weekly updated info and prepares the first time traveler to Bali for the unexpected.

I found this book quite informative and useful in its information about many different aspects of visiting Bali. The book provides wonderful cultural insights, historical background and detailed information.

The only major discrepancy we came across, for instance, was that the book said that Kuta has problems with tourists being hassled by street vendors, but when we went in April, we found that the main street in Kuta (where the Matahari Department Store is) quite the opposite. It turned out that the officials had just recently come down on the street vendors and put a stop to harassing tourists there. Instead, when we went to the center of town in Ubud, we were hassled a great deal by taxi/moped drivers to get us to hire them; this caught us off guard.

In response to concerns that the book isn't current on it's information, I feel that you shouldn't rely on a guidebook for prices, and that as a whole Lonely Planet Bali & Lombok gives the information that you need to know. It tells you in great detail about what there is to see and do, and where things are and how things work. I mean afterall, by the time any book reaches publication, isn't a lot of the information out-of-date? Otherwise, a book would never get published; it would be a newsletter.

I gave this a rating of 4 stars only because when we went to Bali, we didn't travel enough of the country (and we didn't get to Lombok) to give the book 5 stars.

We have just returned from Bali (October 2000) and strongly recommend taking this LP with you. I have been a bit skeptical about the info of some LP's (Mexico-we hardly used it!) but in Bali whoever put this one together knew their stuff. FORGET THE PRICES MENTIONED, they've at least doubled for meals accomodation etc , but then so has the amount of rupee you'll get!! One interesting note. We took a taxi to the Temple of Gudang Kawi, an 11th century temple. LP justifibly raves about it. The only other tourists there we saw were holding a LP. Local tour operaters didn't seem to think tourists would be interested in it and must take them to more boring temples!(and believe you me, they get boring!)

Like most people that will come to this book, I saw the movie version first and was so impressed by it that I went to the bookstore as fast as I could to get the novel of it. Was I ever disappointed by it. I knew I was in trouble when in the first paragraph I read the simile "the mountains were like a stairway to heaven". The whole stairway to heaven bit is just the first in a long line of cliches in this book that are the trademark of lazy and unimaginative writers. I'll get to the rest later but this is one of the few times where the movie is better than the book.

The Whale Rider centers on a Maori tribe in Whangara, New Zealand whose traditions are threatened by the same thing that threatens all cultures. Forgetfullness. There are no traditions unless they are passed down from one generation to the next. The aging chief, named Koro Apirana, has a son named Porourengi who will take over after his death. The problem is that he worries about the generation after since Porouangi has a daughter instead of a hoped for son. Koro wants the bloodline to continue through sons, not daughters. So he scorns the girl-child, who is given the name Kahu. He is outraged by this name because it is the ancient name of the mythical figure from whom the whole tribe is descended. This figure was the friend of whales and rode on their backs and knew their language. Like King Arthur, he vowed that in its time of greatest need, he would return to help his people. Kahu might just be that returning savior who could join Nature and Man together again, but how will she attain the position when she has to constantly strive against the sexism of her great-grandfather who says he has no use for her an does not allow her to learn the ways of the tribe?

Unlike the movie, where the main character is Kahu, the main narrator of the book is Rawiri, who is Koro's second son, and who was portrayed in the movie as an overweight drunk. In the book, he is sort of a bad boy who is in a motorcycle gang but he respects tradition and is Kahu's appointed protector. Kahu is almost a minor character in the novel. She flits in and out of the plot but she's not in the spotlight as such until the closing chapters. Kahu's father also plays a smaller role than in the film.

Why did I dislike this book? Because when I seek the book a film was based on, I seek it because in novels you are supposed to get far deeper meanings than you can get from an image on a screen. You should be able to get more backstory, more characterization, more thought. I got none of these things from reading the novel. It was dull and boring. The characters were lifeless. They had no inner life. There was some use of whales as characters in the book and they talk using completely human words like "radiation" and "data-banks" which totally went against the whole in tune with nature thing to me and became goofy. The book was emotionless. It had no heart. As Bill and Ted would say, it was "most untriumphant". If I had read the book before I had seen the movie, I would not have gone to see it. That's how bad this book was.

To me, weirdly enough, the film has more story to it, and the screenwriters did a brillant job. They made the story BETTER if you can believe it. Go see the film! It was one of the most brillant movies I have ever seen. The acting is superb, especially the girl that plays Kahu. I really admire the filmmakers for turning an awful book into one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. Avoid this book. The novelization of the film Dude, Where's my Car? would be better than reading this. I was so disappointed.

Directed by Niki Caro
Based on the novel by Witi Ihimaera

Rated (PG)
Drama ... Running time: 105 minutes
Setting: Whangara New Zealand
Staring: Keisha Castle- Hughes... Pia
Rawiri Paratene... Koro
Vicky Haughton... Nanny flowers
Cliff Curtis... Porourangi

Whale Rider is a touching drama about a young Maori girl who finds and fulfils her destiny. The young girl, Paikea is rased by her grandparents in the traditional village of Whangara. Whangara is where a carving on Whitireia Meeting House commemorates the legendary Paikea, who travelled on the back of a whale. The near by island is said to be the final resting place of the whale.
Paikea is extremely inquisitive and wants to find out all she can about her ancestors and her heritage. She is extremely brave and has a spiritual connection with the sea.
Her grandfather, Koro, is the Chief of the Ngati Kanohi tribe. Koro's belief is that his first-born child, Porourangi, should become the next chief, but it becomes clear that is not to be. When Porourangi makes it clear that he does not want to become chief Koro looks towards his grandchildren. Tragically Porourangi's wife dies while giving birth to the twins and takes her son with her, leaving him with a daughter and a whole heap of heartache. Koro is disappointed that Pai, being a girl, is unable to take on the roll of chief; little does he know that this it is to be her destiny.
This movie is a heart-wrenching journey that follows Pia's determination to prove to her grandfather that she is worthy of his love and respect.
This is a magical movie and would appeal to many types of people.
The time and effort that would have gone into the making of it has made it a brilliant movie. It has been wonderfully directed and the characters were perfect for the parts they played.

Witi Ihimaera is one of those authors that at one time I was "made" to read as part of NZ High School English curriculum. I have recently discovered the joy of re-reading his work as an ex-pat Kiwi living in the US.
"Whale Rider" the movie has certainly made waves with it's wonderful adaptation of this beautiful work.
The book is filled with images plucked from any rural Kiwi up bringing - Maori or pakeha.
Witi's ability to combine Maori and English in a seamless narrative is what made this book the wonderful read it is.
I highly recommend it - and look forward to more of his work being readily available in this country.

i would like to order a book that is telling all old samoan stories and customs and the faasamoa in the samoan language..

I used the Moon guidebook to Tonga and Samoa during a 3 1/2 week trip to the South Pacific in early 2001. I found the book very useful because it covers Tonga and Samoa in one condensed book. There are enough details to travel on both island groups for a couple of weeks and not missing information in this great guidebook. The book is still quite accurate there is enough details for each spot you will visit on your trip. In general this book has helped me a lot to find my way around the islands with detailed maps and a wide range of unbiased information.

As president of Sea for Yourself snorkeling tours, I'm obligated on behalf of my clients, to stay informed about the destinations we visit. Although we've been operating programs in Tonga for many years that allow snorkelers to actually swim with humpback whales, we keep a copy of David's Tonga/Samoa Handbook in the office in order to answer questions from clients about areas other than Tonga. In addition to Tonga, this book has extensive coverage of Samoa, American Samoa, and Niue.

In this book, the reader will find all the practical info (that continues to distinguish all of David's books) including travel tips, accommodations, meals, etc. I also appreciate the special attention given to cultural background, political and economic elements, and particular vignettes (such as the explanations of coral reef ecology and the palolo worm). However, the sections I personally find most useful include the pages on Internet sites, email addresses, and the bibliography.

I started using David's books (South Pacific Handbook) in 1982, and they have always been valuable and trusted travel companions. We always take this book with us on our programs to Tonga because it makes a useful reference for both staff and participants. Plus, since this book is easily available, I'm always happy to refer our clients to David's Tonga/Samoa Handbook when they are seeking to purchase a single accurate source of both practical and background information about this section of the Pacific.

With the exception of the first couple of pages that describe perfectly an Australian beach on a hot day (and which made me think that I would enjoy the book), this is a very ordinary novel. I lost interest completely in the characters, who I thought to be cardboard, and found the incident in Chartres with the priest very silly. Perhaps the problem I had was that I read this straight after reading Atonement. Conditions of Faith pales in comparison.

Alex Miller provides us with a novel that is easy to follow and hard to put down. Though it is enjoyable and touching, it lacks a depth of the parallel and lacks layers. The story is exactly what you read, there are no double meanings, no possible alternatives to the predicable unresolved situations.
The novel is set in the 1920's, yet the social attitudes in the book represent that of the modern era. As does the main character, Emily, who in separating herself from her family in order to follow her dreams, and to defy her husbands wishes presents us with a story we can relate to because we most probably are experienceing or observing situations and problems around us in the year 2003 similar to what emily is experiencing. Yet the story is quite unbelievable given the time in which the novel is set and the cultures that surround it. Such as Emily not attending church with the Elder family whilst in Charters; this just would not have been acceptable in 1920 Paris, but is quite acceptable now for people to be non-religious.
We come to know and like each of the characters, yet they too lack a depth of reality. They appear two dimentional and we see only of them what Emily sees them to be. We see Georges as almost a mechanical, unemotional figure who cares only for his bridge. We become infuriated with him being so content with his life, he ignores Emily's lack of contentment and cold behaviours, and is content suffering these as long as he can keep her, and this contentment of his makes Emily feel more trapped into a life she doesnt want to live and feels she cannot; and we then become infuriated by Georges contentment we think: why is this man such a fool? We see only his content and his dream. There is not much else to his character. Though we see he loves Emily, we dont get an insight or depth into this love and Georges emotions and feelings. We dont even get a deep insight into Georges and Emily's relationship, it lacks a realistic connection between the 2 characters and their marriage almost does not operate but is just apart of the context. They make love, but this lacks just as much emotion and detail as the sweet things emily says to georges to reassure him she is happy; which of course is not true.
All in all this is a long but light story in which we can clearly derive the value of being true to ourselves and following our dreams. We can relate to the main character being a woman searching for herself in the world and searching for her roles in life. The situation the charcter finds herself in is realistic, even if the setting of the novel and its characters lack reality; because it inevitably is about choices and how choices can rule our lives, what consequences we have to suffer as a result of our choices and how we can survive with these sufferings and be faithful to ourselves. And we realsie that it is important that people in our lives have faith in us for us to be able to acheive.

P>Alex Miller's latest novel, like his best-known book, "Ancestor Game," centers on international travels and emigrations whose starting point is his home country of Australia. His inspiration to write "Conditions of Faith" came from his mother's journal, which he found after her death. From entries his mother made about her experiences as a young woman living in Paris during the 1920s, his novel's restless heroine was born.

Emily Stanton is a bright 25-year-old Australian with eager dreams of making a brave, original life for herself. In the tradition of George Eliot's Middlemarch and Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, her story turns on the irony that a woman's very determination to transcend the world's conventional restrictions can blind her to the realities hidden behind her bravest choices. As Emily tries to make herself a character in a life story that will be uniquely true to her desires, she gets tangled in the narratives of other persons.

It's 1923, and Emily meets Georges, a promising architect ten years her senior who has come to Australia from Paris to brainstorm designs for the proposed Sydney Harbor Bridge, which will be the longest in the world. Although Emily might have embarked on a career of her own - she earned a First in history at Cambridge -she rejects that possibility to marry Georges.

This hardly sounds like an iconoclastic role choice for a woman desiring freedom. But Emily makes her decision on impulse, and very much against her father's expectation that she'll pursue a brilliant scholarly career. To her, rebelling against her father is a radical gesture that throws off a great burden. She won't surrender to family demands; she'll find her own purpose in life. And she'll do it in Paris!

Emily soon discovers family demands everywhere. Georges takes her to Chartres, where she meets his mother. This woman has always dominated her son's life, and she makes sure Emily knows that his ancestors' names appear in the 12th-century records of the great cathedral. Emily, vexed at her mother-in-law's arrogance and at her husband's blindness to her misery, has a fling at Chartres that complicates the rest of her life. The story is full of unexpected turns that take Emily all the way to Tunisia and the archaeological dig at Carthage, where history finally becomes more than an academic subject and takes on vital meaning for her.

Throughout the novel we meet intriguing characters, including Emily's powerful yet vulnerable father, and her mother, a woman of moral weight and wit who sees clearly and won't mince words. Georges' friend Antoine becomes Emily's confidant in Paris, and he's a terrific talker. So are others who play major supporting roles in the book, like the Paris doctor Leon, the Arab archaeologist Hakim, and the scholar Olive Kallam.

This strength is also a weakness in the narrative. You'd think a heroine in a novel full of conversation, who is described as assertive and intelligent, would speak up. But all the other characters talk more than she, and more interestingly.

Still, regardless of who's speaking at a given moment, the writing is provocative and absorbing on subjects ranging from Arab politics to the politics of motherhood, from freedom of choice to purpose in life.

For example: Is finding no purpose in life more frightening than finding a purpose that wholly takes it over? Can ambition substitute for purpose? Georges' ambition to build a fabulous bridge doesn't lead him to ask about what purpose it might serve - - a question that "'involves a kind of moral uncertainty ' for which Georges possesses no curiosity.'"

But is purpose really different from ambition, or desire? Perhaps "'all passions are the same passion'" in that "'our passions always require from us a betrayal of our former state.'"

This kind of talk makes you glad "Conditions of Faith" can't be described as a page-turner. You want to put this book down and think about it.

I agree with Mr. Chiu in one of the previous reviews. I was expecting great photography in this type of book, but instead the book is filled with small, grainy, blury pictures. A much better 'Coffee Table' book is 'Tropical Asian Style', in my opinion.

First my complaints.

For what I consider to be a coffee table book, the quality of the photographs (on average 1-2 per page), was incredibly poor. They were simply very blurry and not sharp at all.

The book also doesn't quite know whether it wants to be a book on architecture, interior design or Bali society gossip column. I especially hated the constant name dropping on "so and so" used to be the life of the Bali party scene and how extravagant the parties were (well, I guess that has gone away definitely since the Bali bombings). I don't mind a short blurbs on the owners, but enough is enough.

Now to the good points.

The author is a well known and accomplished landscape architect in Bali, so he obviosly knows what he is talking about and what the owner was trying to accomplish in creating these wonderful houses.

But I think you can get the same thing from other recent books by the same author, which has much sharper and clearer photos.

I would like to comment on a previous review, on this fine book, as a photographer i am happy to see Isabella Giananneschi work as different from the usual "sharp" "crispy" and predictable images, hers is very expressive and for someone who lives for 6 months in a year in Bali, she was able to capture the mood of the place beautifully. I also believed that she should be credited for bringing her work to a higher level of sophistication.this book is a must buy and 5 stars to the photographer and the author for thier efforts!

I find Let's Go guides are always great. But after travelling around a country as big as Australia, something more than accurate information is needed. I used the Frommer's Guide from $50 a day as well as this one. I found Frommer's is easier for organizing a trip where you have to be aware of the very long distances. Information is better classified and very professional. It offers a cut above backpacker's information too and excellent advice on diving and other adventures. (And a detail that at least really simplifies my economy is that prices always have the AUD value beside them.) Of course, Let's Go, printed later, has better information on the Sydney 2000 Olympics and a wider variety of hostels.

I used the 1999-Aus book as a guide for my trip to Australia. From the very beginning where it guided me to the cheapest ticket to Sydney, I knew it was a great book. The maps in the book were good and the activities suggested were fantastic. If you are in college or recently out (like me) and you enjoy the outdoors this book is for you. Among my complaints were some of the food establishments suggested: one even made me sick. My other large complaint is that there are plenty of cheap hotels in Aus that aren't reviewed or suggested. Let's go seems to favor hostels above all else. The Final Word: If you need to plan your trip and want suggestions of what to see (anywhere, ANYWHERE in the country) then I whole heartedly suggest this book.

Not knowing anything about Australia, I was hesitant about taking off on my own but after reading the Let's go book, it seemed like I knew the country. When I got there I felt I had an edge, not only did I know places to stay and where to eat, I learned about a number of unspoiled spots to explore. I've seen other books and this one is definately the best!