I don't think a pdf version of Water Sinks is available.
Mark
At 12:34 AM 7/29/2013, Charles Goldsmith wrote:
Bill, is the author selling the pdf format anywhere?
On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 11:17 PM, Mixon Bill <bmixon...@austin.rr.com> wrote:
I'm sure this won't raise a lot of interest, but...
Caves and Karst of the Water Sinks Area. Philip
C. Lucas. Revised edition, 2012. 8.25 by 10.25
inches, 369 pages, hardbound. $95.58 plus
postage from lulu.com; search for Philip Lucas.
This is a great book. After I received the
privately published book, I delayed reviewing
it, hoping that the NSS would pick it up, but
for some reason they passed. They could have
published it with almost no effort and little
risk and sold it for good bit less, if only to
be of service to its members, but a large
hardbound book with color illustrations
throughout cannot be really inexpensive.
The book is the story of what happens when a
caver with an engineering bent buys property in
Virginia that contains small caves and potential
digs. The result has been fifteen miles of cave
with entrances on Lucas's property and that of a
neighbor, including the Water Sinks system,
Helictite Cave, and Wishing Well Cave. The
exploration of these caves has been unusually
well documented, both in trip reports and
photographs. Besides maps and descriptions of
the caves, the book contains reports on
essentially all the digging or exploration
trips, mostly written by Lucas. I actually found
the trip reports much more interesting reading
than the formal cave descriptions, as they give
a better idea of the caves and the effort that
went into finding and mapping them. The
technical aspects are fascinating, especially
the innovative ways of temporarily stabilizing
breakdown and creating airflow to locate
connections. "Straws," however, are nowhere really described.
The editing by Nathan Farrar is excellent, and
the design and layout, by Lucas and Farrar, are
very well done. Some of the nearly six hundred
color photographs could have used some color
adjustment, but generally they illustrate the
work and the caves very well. A special effort
seems to have been made to include lots of clear
photographs of the participants in the projects.
(One of them would make a good hobbit.)
Portraits on pages 101 and 104 are especially nice.
I can't deny that this is an expensive book
about a pretty narrow subject, and the story
could have been told almost as well in a less
costly way. (No profit is being made by anybody
but Lulu.com.) To anyone who really likes cave books, it's worth it.
Lulu.com prints your copy on demand. The result
in this case is sturdily bound in a printed
hardcover. They also sell a number of other
books on caves and caving. If you just search
for caves you'll have to wade through scores of
probably awful self-published novels. Besides
Water Sinks, worthy of note are The Hollow
Mountain: 1974-2006 by the Imperial College
Caving Club (deep-cave exploration, printed
paperback or free PDF, reviewed in March 2008
NSS News), Al Warild's Vertical (techniques
manual, paperback, reviewed August 2002), and D.
F. Machant's Life on a Line (rope rescue,
paperback, reviewed June 2003).Bill Mixon
Please reply to mmin...@caver.net
Permanent email address is mmin...@illinoisalumni.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Visit our website: http://texascavers.com
To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com
For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
