Customer Reviews

Southern California's Best Ghost Towns: A Practical Guide

5 star:		(2)
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3 star:		(1)
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The book is a nice, but limited resource as it has been quite a few years since publication. Photos are B&W, but it is generally well written and has directions to the sties that are described.

The author visited the various ghost towns. He tells their stories, what's left and how to get there. The hardcover 1990 edition is lavish with photos and maps.

The book itself is putting on some years. Though published twenty years ago (before the world wide web!), the research was done in the previous decade. So some of the information is a quarter century or more old. Eagle Mountain, for example, is no longer accessible, being fenced and gated according to Wikipedia. A modern work would probably include some of the Salton Sea towns.

The drawings are not by the author but by James Davis and are exquisite.

Why is a book about Southern California ghost towns published by the University of -- Oklahoma -- ? Doesn't the University of California have a press?

Varney doesn't seem too old in a couple of the photos. I'm hoping he's working on an update. Apparently he published another book this year (2010, "Ghost Towns of the Mountain West") so there is hope he'll run out of material and come back to old stomping grounds for another look around.

I used this book on a trip to Southern California and tried to find of the few ghost towns with a friend. We had a good time locating some on a day trip. Pictures were good but a little old.