I recently received An Ifugao Notebook as I was getting ready to move my family, including two young children, to Africa. I was moved by the humor, wisdom, and tenderness this book evokes through children's encounters with another culture. It makes me feel good about my own decision to let my kids explore life in other countries, and get them to think of themselves as global citizens, not just patriotic Americans, from an early age. This is a great book--wonderful for all generations.

While the head of the family, a cultural anthropologist, conducts a year-long program studying a primitive agrarian society in a remote region of the Philippines, the author (his wife) and 2 young sons set up housekeeping in a thatched-hut compound and are plunged into the life of the village. In addition to assisting in the scientific studies and generally overseeing the domestic wellbeing of the family, the author home-schools the two boys whose education is otherwise broadened by acceptance into the activities of the local youth. Adapting to the primitive conditions of life in the village is not without its problems, and the author provides a vivid account of the family's experiences. A helpful glossary is included, as well as a pronouncing dictionary of the Ifugao language. Highly recommended!

I just read An Ifugao Notebook cover to cover (no mean feat with a 3 year old!), and loved it. It was vivid, and personal, qualities missing from most ethnographies! It was also very well written; I particularly liked Jean Conklin's device of writing from the perspectives of her children and her cat. I got so attached to everyone I was grateful for the Epilogue! That Jean did everything she did that year, and this notebook too, is really astounding to me, as an anthropologist and a wife and mother. Read this book if you know Hal Conklin's work for insight on how it happened. But also read it if you're doing fieldwork anywhere with family.

There are books that are fine and attractive volumes, books that are valuable for their purview of other cultures, books that stand alone as art. This atlas, in truth a working volume and nothing to be set aside in some sterile cabinet, is all of those and then some. There are a couple of books that joust for the title of the most beautiful and well-conceived in late 20th century bookmaking -- without a doubt this would be one of the very few.

A colleague of mine in graduate school first turned me toward Conklin's work; since then, it occupies a place in my pantheon of the most important works of mainstream cartography even produced, right up there with *The California Water Atlas* (produced in 1980 at vast expense to the State of California), the Richard Kagan-edited *Spanish Cities of the Golden Age*, and perhaps some of the Princeton Architectural Press volumes of the late 1990s.

And, y'know, that should count for something. An atlas isn't easy to produce, it's costly and it requires an almost impossible amount to labor. To end up with something so spectacular as the Conklin *Ethnographic Atlas* is an ultimate tribute to him and to his team, as authors, but even more, to Yale University Press, which originally printed the atlas -- although they also allowed it to go out of print, for which we can only mouth the phrase "shame."

Buy this if you can, consult it in a [really good] library if you can't buy it, and in either event, cherish the knowledge of place and of experience that such a work offers.

This atlas is a work of art and a national treasure. This ethnographic atlas is for serious students of Ifugao and the Philippine Cordillera Central. The atlas is also a model for world-wide ethnographic studies. There is not another precedent for such a work. In order to truly appreciate his in-depth analysis of Ifugao agriculture, down to the rice pannicle, one has to see how complex Ifugao agricultural life really is. Rarely in this world do we find individuals as dedicated to their scholarly work as Mr. Conklin.