Book Reviews

Basic Essentials: Cooking in the Outdoors

by Cliff Jacobson and

Basic Essentials: Canoeing

by Cliff Jacobson

Reviewed by Carl Anderson

Both titles were very good, nice and short, easy to read, with updated, current and useful information. As in typical Cliff Jacobson style, they were concise and to the point.

Basic Essentials: Cooking in the Outdoors

A good book about cooking that is more than a cookbook. Cliff weaves in nutritional facts, good tricks and helpful hints, ideas on how to set up a good efficient kitchen in the woods, and stories about his cooking experiences. The illustrations by Cliff Moen weren't only enjoyable to look at, but added content to the book-as did the excellent diagrams. It covered the full spectrum of cooking in the outdoors-from how many calories to figure per person when menu planning, to how many days pita bread will keep on a trip.

And what's a book about cooking without recipes? There were some mouthwatering new recipes-and some new twists to some old favorites. All of them are easy to follow and easy to make on the trail. All in all a good basic book about cooking in the outdoors that I recommend to beginners and seasoned travelers alike.

Basic Essentials: Canoeing

A good basic generic book that covers all the essentials of canoeing-thus its title. While it won't make you an expert in paddling-it will cover the fundamental aspects needed to get started. I would have liked to have had this book in May when I taught the Efficient Paddling classes-it would have been an excellent reference book to compliment the shore lectures I gave to explain some basic concepts. Some of the things that I especially liked were the diagrams that he uses to help explain the things he wrote about, his focus on safety, the instruction on how to portage-including how to get the bost up onto your shoulders, and how he uses his own mistakes and misfortunes as examples of things you don't want to do.

Cliff did a good job of covering a broad subject-from buying a used canoe to the sit and switch style of paddling. As always with his books, there were many useful hints and tips to make canoeing life easier. I recommend this book to anyone who is thinking about starting to canoe, is a beginner paddler or is just trying to learn some basics and figure out what questions to ask. I also recommend it to experienced paddlers to remind us of the basics that we sometimes take for granted.