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Great Escapes: Northern California (Great Escapes) Review

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(More customer reviews)I always thought you should have a really heavy guidebook when traveling, even close to home. But I don't think that any more after reading this one. This book is a great deal, an excellent guide for both locals and visitors to the Bay Area. From Big Sur to Mendocino to Lake Tahoe, it gathers a wide range of both well-known and more obscure Northern California destinations in a concise, informative, and personable volume. Its less than 200 pages are packed with dozens of ideas for one- to three-day getaways with ample specifics to keep you busy.
The book pulls it off through a combination of tight, interesting writing and limited but thoughtful and discerning listings for things like food and lodging. Other examples of this approach: This isn't the guide for a full-bore winery tour, but it will get you to some smaller off-the-beaten-track vintners. And while Great Escapes includes San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, it skips the typical tourist attractions, instead opting to describe some neighborhoods and spots that locals will recognize approvingly.
Use this book on its own for some outstanding and even unexpected experiences, or as a starting point for your Northern California travels. As someone who has lived in San Francisco for several years, the book makes me realize how many places I didn't even know I wanted to visit.

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Fodor's Northern California 2009: with Napa, Sonoma, Yosemite, San Francisco, and Lake Tahoe (Fodor's Gold Guides) Review

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(More customer reviews)We used this book for our recent vacation to Napa, Sonoma, Lake Tahoe and a quick trip through San Francisco. Everything it suggested was right on, hotels and resturants. We had an excellent vacation and the map that is included was very helpful for our trip. I will use it again for out next trip out to Monteray and Carmel.

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Fodor's. For Choice Travel Experiences.Fodor's helps you unleash the possibilities of travel by providing the insightful tools you need to experience the trips you want. Although you're at the helm, Fodor's offers the assurance of our expertise, the guarantee of selectivity, and the choice details that truly define a destination. It's like having a friend in Northern California!•Updated annually, Fodor's Northern California provides the most accurate and up-to-date information available in a guidebook.•Fodor's Northern California features options for a variety of budgets, interests, and tastes, so you make the choices to plan your trip of a lifetime.•If it's not worth your time, it's not in this book. Fodor's discriminating ratings, including our top tier Fodor's Choice designations, ensure that you'll know about the most interesting and enjoyable places in Northern California.•Experience Northern California like a local! Fodor's Northern California includes choices for every traveler, from skiing the Southern Sierra and hiking the North Coast to vineyard hopping in Sonoma and relaxing in San Francisco's trendy cafés, and much more! •Indispensable, customized trip planning tools include "Top Reasons to Go," "Word of Mouth" advice from other travelers, and tips to help save money, bypass lines, and avoid common travel pitfalls.•Fodor's Northern California includes a pullout map!Visit Fodors.com for more ideas and information, travel deals, vacation planning tips, reviews and to exchange travel advice with other travelers.

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San Carlos (CA) (Images of America) Review

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(More customer reviews)I grew up in San Carlos, CA in the late 1940s thru the mid 1950s. This book is like a ViewMaster of my personal memories. I spent many Saturday afternoons at the theater on the cover watching those (for me at the time) amazing serial Westerns. Lots of great photos and good writing. Highly recommended.

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California: A Study of American Character : From the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco (California Legacy Book) Review

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(More customer reviews)....but Royce is a very fine writer, and his book on California history, though penned long ago, makes very interesting reading. At the center of the book is Royce's discussion of Fremont's role in the conquest of California, and the conclusions he draws after interviewing Fremont himself and even showing him parts of this book. Definitely required reading for the student of California history.

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First published in 1886, Josiah Royce's California: A Study of American Character chronicles the early history of American California. But unlike historians of the West who view the conquering American spirit with unmitigated admiration, Royce sought to tell a fuller story, to bridge the distance between the West of the imagination and the West as it truly was.Preferring fact to myth and optimism to despair, Royce wrote history that acknowledges what was truly brave and heroic while revealing the moral consequences of the American conquest of Mexican California. His history of the West is not a simple story of either vindication or shame, but a pioneering work of complexity and multiplicity that predates by nearly a century what we now call the new western history.With a new foreword by historian Ronald A. Wells.

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San Francisco: Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area: History and Guide Review

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(More customer reviews)Any book that claims to be a guide to the architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area has to be either thick as a brick (a la White & Willensky's guide to NYC) or carefully (and subjectively) selective. This book is an example of the latter. While I like the color photography, the essays and the broad geographic coverage of the book, I don't particularly like the selected buildings. All the real landmarks are here, but beyond that there's a definite domestic, modernist and arts & crafts favoritism. It's much more like Sutro's AIA guide to San Diego than Gebhard & Winters' guide to Los Angeles. Chances are, if your favorite buildings are landmarks (of any age) or modernist attractions, they'll be in here. If they're older traditional structures that don't quite make landmark status, they probably will NOT be in here. So that begs the question: When are we going to get a really good comprehensive guide to the entire Bay Area? Granted, such a task is enormous, but not impossible. Such guides exist for New York City and the state of North Carolina, for example.
The volume itself is attractively printed and bound.

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Bay Area Mountain Bike Trails: 45 Mountain Bike Rides Throughout the San Francisco Bay Area Review

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(More customer reviews)Conrad's mountain bike book is in his normal, factual and precise format. No fluff here. He helps you determine the aerobic and technical difficulty, locate the trialhead, and takes you through the odometer driven turns. Trail information is very complete and includes 2 graphics per trail: one a normal map with arrows, the other a chart showing elevation change per mile. You can still get lost or get in over your head, but not because of this book.
My only complaint is that some of my favorite mountain bike areas and trails are not included. On the other side, I'm kinda glad.

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Completely revised and updated, the second edition of Bay Area Mountain Bike Trails gives mountain bikers all the information they need to hit the trails of the Bay Area. This handy and complete guidebook details off-road biking areas in San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Gilroy, Mount Diablo, Mount Tamalpais, the Marin Headlands, Santa Cruz, and Livermore. The rides range from five to 33 miles and are within easy distance of the region's major cities, and carefully prepared directions and detailed maps make each route easy to follow.

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100 Classic Hikes in Northern California: Sierra Nevada/ Cascade Mountains/ Klamath Mountains/ Coast Range and North Coast/ San Francisco Bay Area Review

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(More customer reviews)I just got this book. It is the most beautiful hiking guide I've ever seen. There are nearly a hundred full-color photos, and even the maps are creatively colored. We leave it on our coffee table for easy perusal. It's an updated edition of 100 Hikes in Northern California, and it has thorough descriptions of all my favorite hikes, and many others my wife and I are planning to do this winter (in the Bay Area) and next summer (in the Sierra Nevada and maybe in the Trinity Alps). We have two other hiking books on Northern California, but this one is definitely our favorite. If you are only getting one hiking guide for the north state, this is it.

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San Francisco Architecture: The Illustrated Guide to Over 600 of the Best Buildings, Parks, and Public Artworks in the Bay Area Review

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(More customer reviews)San Francisco is a city with a long and unique history. With this history comes a wide variety of interesting and sometimes stunningly beautiful buildings. Wandering the streets of San Francisco, and noticing these buildings, one frequently wants to learn more about them. And that is why I bought this book.
However, I was disappointed by the fact that most of the houses featured in this volume only have the year it was built, who built it, and a very brief description. Often there is only one sentence saying this house was built in Queen Anne style and that it has a tower (self-evident from the picture, or once you actually see the building). The book says very little about the history of each house, why it was built like it was, notable persons that lived there, etc. It also does very little to put the houses in the context of the surrounding neighborhood.
The book features "tours" that you can take to view the described houses, but it doesn't quite pull it off, and the end result is a strange mix of tourist guide and architectural reference that performs mediocre at both.
San Francisco desperately needs a good book to picture, describe and catalog its unique architecture, but alas, this book is not it. It would have been better if the author concentrated the book on San Francisco houses only, instead of the entire Bay Area, and offered fewer houses with a better description of each. Still, it is the best I have been able to find, and it is better than nothing, hence the three stars.

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Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area Review

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(More customer reviews)There is a recent, substantial review of this guidebook by Steven Finacom in the Berkeley Daily Planet, Weekday Edition, Oct.30-Nov.1, 2007. Some excerpts are:
"A long-awaited, much-needed, and up-to-date guide to the great and representative buildings and architectural history of the Bay Area debuts this month."....
"This guide is organized geographically by county, with individual cities, districts, and structures provided. The writers went into the field with notebook and camera as well as consulting an array of historical documents, surveys, and local experts." ....
"Architecturally, the most prominent local communities such as San Francisco and Berkeley have been well covered by previous guides (including two written by Cerny) and published architectural histories. However, many smaller or less visible Bay Area towns, cities and neighborhoods have been overlooked.
"This book, with more than 500 pages of text and over 2,000 individual entries, rectifies the imbalance and provides a regional perspective, addressing not just the older city centers but the suburbs, and profiling their major edifices and representative structures from cattle ranching days to Gold Rush to dot-com boom." ....
"They [Cerny and her co-authors] brought a catholic sensibility to their writing and selection of projects, respectfully showing the whole panorama of Bay Area architectural history and urban development." ....
"If you're at all interested in the architecture and history of the Bay Area, this will be an indispensable reference to own. I may, in fact, get two copies; one for home, and one that stays in the car, so that on trips through the Bay Area, quick answers to "what building is that?" can finally be found."

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An Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area is the definitive guide to the history and architecture of the nine San Francisco Bay Area counties. This compendium has been written and photographed by Susan Cerny and twelve Bay Area experts and provides a historic record of how the area developed to became what it is today, and discusses transportation systems, city and suburban landscape plans, public parkland, California history, and economic, social, and political influences. Included are San Francisco Victorians, civic buildings, churches, parks, grand Period Revivals, and rustic Arts and Crafts homes, as well as significant vernacular buildings in less publicized neighborhoods and towns.

Features include:

Buildings by all major San Francisco Bay Area architects from the 1860s to the present.

More than 2,000 entries.

Architectural landmarks in every Bay Area county, arranged by chapter: San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Napa, Sonoma, and Marin.

More than 100 cities, towns, and neighborhoods.

A history of architectural styles popular in the Bay Area.

More than 20,000 copies sold of our previous architecture guide to the Bay Area.

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San Francisco Architecture: An Illustrated Guide to the Outstanding Buildings, Public Art Works, and Parks in the Bay Area of California Review

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(More customer reviews)The new edition of San Francisco Architecture is everything a portable guide to the built environment should be: organized, accessible, and with enough detail to expand one's sense of time, place, and people. Fortunately, from this reader's point of view, it was written for a lay, rather than specialist, audience; the result is neither exhaustive nor exhausting, merely highly informative. As with any reference book, it must address specific information needs of a specific audience, and, in my estimation, this guide does so very well for a reader with general interest in buildings around the Bay Area.
San Francisco Architecture is unusually well designed and produced: the photography, layout, information structure, typography and printing (espcially the halftone reproduction) are all exemplary and reinforcing of each other. Visually, it is as satisfying as it is workmanlike -- free of excess or caprice and dedicated to serving information effectively.

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Visitors and residents alike continue to be pleasantly astonished by the rich and varied architectural heritage of the San Francisco Bay Area. This completely revised and updated guide offers a comprehensive catalog of noteworthy and representative sites, including residential and commercial buildings, parks, and public art works, each illustrated by an accompanying photograph. All are located within the major San Francisco neighborhoods as well as outlying areas. Useful maps, descriptive tidbits, and sightseeing hints embellish this densely packed volume. Whether used as the basis for a walking tour or as a reference for students and historians, SAN FRANCISCO ARCHITECTURE is the definitive guide to the natural and urban development of one of the most recognized and visited areas in the world. A completely revised and updated guide to San Francisco Bay Area architecture with new entries, photographs, and maps. Illustrated with more than 600 photographs.Of the many guidebooks on the San Francisco Bay Area, this is the only one to offer a comprehensive catalog of architectural sites.

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Afoot and Afield: San Francisco Bay Area: A Comprehensive Hiking Guide Review

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(More customer reviews)Wilderness Press has a series of books on the SF Bay Area hiking trails (two of which are written by Weintraub): East Bay Trails, South Bay Trails, North Bay Trails, and Peninsula Trails. Those books are excellent and obviously have the kind of complete and detailed coverage that a single book of the same size cannot offer for the same vast area. But if you wish to buy only a single book on hiking in the SF Bay Area, this one is the best I've seen. It discusses hiking opportunities from Santa Rosa in the north to just outside Santa Cruz in the south. It discusses more hikes than any other book (except the Foghorn one, which however offers no maps). It has excellent maps, along with detailed directions, the attractions of each hike, the best season for the hike, and so on. Unlike those in some other books, the maps included cover more than just the hikes discussed, so in essence it leads you to many more trails than those listed in the book. It also mentions (though does not have the space to discuss in detail) some of the flora and fauna you might notice on the hike, and offers some photos. If you don't get separate books on each area, this is almost certainly the one to get.

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