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
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