Mike somebody saw Peter Swart's caving guide in Half Price Books.
Here's my review of it. It appeared in the March 2003 NSS News. -- Mixon
"Caving." Peter Swart. Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania;
2002. ISBN 0-8117-2052-7. 7.5 by 10.5 inches, 96 pages, softbound.
$16.95.
I did not have high hopes for this book. Stackpole’s earlier book with
the same title, by Steven Boga, is one of the worst caving books ever
written, and I had heard that at least one major cave-book dealer had
refused to carry this new one. So I was surprised to find that this
book, originally published in South Africa, is in fact a fairly good
elementary introduction to caves and caving, with plenty of safety,
conservation, and land-owner relations advice crammed into the brief
text, which covers caving through easy vertical work, mapping, and
photography. It probably contains about as much useful information as
any book of its length could. A bit too much of the text is in
sidebars for my taste; sidebars seem to be becoming increasingly
common as a crutch for those who cannot organize what they want to say
into a coherent whole. There are, to be sure, a few howlers, such as
the statement that Ellison’s Cave in Georgia is over 1000 meters deep,
but I don’t think I saw anything I’d call a really dangerous mistake.
There are many color photographs, mostly just documentary, showing
items of equipment and the like, but including a number of very scenic
ones by well-known cave photographers. Some of the scenes, though, are
obviously misidentified in the captions, and the index and photo
credits on the last page belong in a different book entirely.
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