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PROFESSIONALS. cs Carolann Steinhoff, BSc. Investment Executive ee “Dedicated Service” James A. Marchand 384-2424 (24 hrs) — SUTTON GROUP WESTCAN REALTY | SCOTIA MCLEOD INC. 389-2113 DOES YOUR PHOTOGRAPH BELONG HERE? IF YOU AREA PROFESSIONAL IN YOUR FIELD CALL US FOR INFORMATION! 381-3484 Doug Vickerd, D.T.CM. Acupuncture #202-1005 Langley St. 384-4350 WE ARE HERE TO SERVE YOU! _ LITERATURE Real - _ Around the world - in two installments Ed. Note: This is the first of two parts dealing with new travel/adventure books. S promised, this is going to be a whirlwind tour of ome of the most magnificent spots on the globe courtesy of Uni- Review Travel, your in- newspaper guide to the exotic, the legendary and the enticingly remote. Afriend recently commented that until she had seen this first book, she had had ab- solutely no desire to visit China. Zhao Ji’s The Natural His- tory of China (McGraw-Hill; 224 pp.; $29.95) will surprise anyone who had thought of this enormous nation as noth- ing but a collection of sullen, smog-shrouded cities con- structed as a reminder that totalitarianism is serious business. This is an extraordinary book for several reasons, the most important of which is that this is the only illustrated natural history of China com- piled to date. And it’s nothing short of breathtaking. There’s hardly a page un- adorned with color photographs, and what in- credible images they are: strange, multihued birds, fish and mammals (most an iden- tification challenge to even the most dedicated fan of nature documentaries) and spec- tacular scenery that ranges from the coastal to the alpine’ with an awe-inspiring diver- sity of ecological panoramas in between. All are explored and ex- plained in the exhaustive text, which takes pains to em- phasize conservation problems and initiatives. People’s Republic? Make that Nature’s Republic. Fabled Cities of Central Asia (191 pp.) is a follow up to last year’s National Geographic- like Kathmandu from Ab- beville Press. Unfortunately, my copy didn’t include a price, but given that Fabled Cities . . . 1s almost identical in format, size and quality to its predecessor, $49.95 is a fairly sate bet. The fabled cities of the title are ones we hardly think of as existing other than in ancient folktales, so unfamiliar are they to most westerners: Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. This near-mythical reputa- tion is due largely to their location in Soviet Uzbekistan. Tourism has not, at least until recently, been encouraged in this area, which lies roughly north of Iran and Afghanistan. While the isolation of the “sarden cities’ (reputedly three of the most beautiful cities in the world, and so they appear in the vast number of photographs scattered throughout the book) is regrettable, it may have con- tributed to the preservation of these former bastions of the Silk Route. The architecture, market gatherings and general scenes of daily life could, in fact, be images of a world not of cen- turies past but of millennia. Writer Robin Magowan and photographer Vadim Gippen- reiter have created a coffee table masterpiece in Fabled Cities of Central Asia, one which is as great a delight to one’s sense of curiosity as it is to one’s eye. “Books West By MIKE STEELE Well, China and Central Asia, inspirers of wanderlust though they undoubtedly are, might lie a tad too far afield for some folks. So let’s swing around to fields of adventure a bit closer to home. It’s virtually an axiom of boating that everyone who has as much as steered a rubber ducky across the suds- speckled waters of a bathtub has had the irrepressible desire to write about the voyage. It therefore takes a very spe- cial nautical narrative to ex- cite the jaded palates of mariners and general readers in search of a vicarious thrill. When The Water Smokes (Al\- gonquin/Thomas Allen & Son; 189 pp.; $23.95) is just such a book. When The Water Smokes is basically a low-budget odys- sey of a couple, Bob and Mary Simpson, who salvaged a sunken, half-century-old workboat (bought for $300), restored it, then spent a sum- mer and autumn cruising the coastal and inland waters of Carolina and Florida. Even: considering the initiaig, _bargain-basement price-tag, there wouldn’t appear to be much potential here for a magazine piece, let alone a book. But wait: what sets it apart is the profoundly evoca- tive, almost rhapsodic writing style of the author, Bob Simpson. There is a gentle, intimate. power that flows through the writer’s descriptions of the in- terplay of all of nature’s com- ponents, large and small. “The revelry and crowds of. summer are long gone. Now the candle of life is burning at its lowest ebb. The burned-out ashes of summer have mingled with ice . . . Summer is noise. Winter is quiet to the point of silence. “On every ice-encrusted sandbar hungry gulls huddle in starving flocks, shivering before the cutting wind. Winter is nature’s method of returning to the realities of life, perhaps as recession or depression is to man. There comes a time of reckoning...” e Poetic, philosophical, When The Water Smokes is not only a story of the passage from one point to another but also an exploration of the relationship between observation and thought, nature without and nature within. Simpson has the rare gift of harnessing words to convey something of the emotional swell that surges in the breast of everyone sensitive to the miraculous, intricate currents of nature. Just another boating book? Just another boater? Hardly: Next week we complete our odyssey with three titles of per- sonal exploration: James Raffan’s Summer North of # Sixty (by Paddle and Portage Across The Barren Lands); Midnight Wilderness (Jour- neys in Alaska’s Arctic Nation- al Wildlife Refuge) by Debbie Miller and Magnetic North (A Trek from the Pacific to the Atlantic by Foot, Dogsled and Canoe) by David Halsey and Diana Landau.