Customer Reviews

Uncle Sam's Guide to the Great Outdoors

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The guide includes a brief description of more than 1,000 public sites and tells the reader where to get more detailed--and usually free--information. For a book of this size (600 pages) and modest price, it is an excellent starting point for the traveler. To include everything else (maps, prices for accommodations, etc.) the book would have to be several times its size and price.

Uncle Sam's Guide to the Great Outdoors is a curious compilation of odds and ends about National Parks, Monuments and Forests. I purchased it in anticipation of an April trip to the Great Smokey Mountain National Park as well as an aid for a June drive from Texas to California. I was looking forward to having e-mail addresses and descriptions of park features in a single compendium rather than scattered through various guide books. My first reaction to the book was dismay that the pages were so barren. There is an astonishing percentage of white space: fonts are large; line and paragraph spacing are loose; and paragraphs are so far from the right margin that my reading lamp glares off the whiteness. If this book were done in the same style as Fodor's, it's total length would decrease by about 70%. My second reaction, based on reading the chapters on Tennessee, Utah, Arizona and California, is who is the audience? If it's intended for people who don't spend much time in national parks, these descriptions won't draw much enthusiasm for visiting. If it's intended for relatively knowledgable hikers, the critical information is scant. There are any number of regional guidebooks that give detailed, highly glowing accounts of National Parks within their area. What I had hoped for was something that exceeded those guides. Instead, there's not enough information to entice the neophyte to a new area, nor is there much help, for example, on whether Zion National Park contains cabins for rent that are in my budget. What would be really useful would be a synopsis of camping and cabin rental availability with price quotes, average monthly high and low temperatures, detailed descriptions of hikes and other activities, maps of the Park, Monument or Forest, maps at the start of each section that locate the sites discussed, statistics on the average numbers of visitors in each month (how crowded is the park?), etc. Most of this information is presented skimpily or not at all in Uncle Sam's. The e-mail addresses will ! very likely be useful, but beyond these items, there is little in this book to recommend it.