Planning a trip to a region as large and diverse as the American South-west involves a lot of decision making, so in this chapter we’ve tried to give you some direction. We’ve chosen what we feel is the very best the region has to offer - the places and experiences you won’t want to miss. Although the sights and activities listed here are written up in more detail elsewhere in this book, this chapter gives you an overview of the highlights and gets you started.

Experience the best a place has to offer on the cruise that’s right for you. Frommer’s. Your trip begins with us: - Exact prices, including brochure rates, with tips on how to find deep discounts, so you can plan the perfect trip no matter what your budget; - Extensive descriptions of all the major ships sailing in Alaska, with information on everything from cabins and ship facilities to shore excursions and recreational activities; - Comprehensive ship ratings that grade the essential elements of a cruise experience (dining, activities, children’s programs, public areas, cleanliness, and overall enjoyment) from “poor” to “outstanding.”

As a child, when my family traveled outside Alaska for vacations, I often met other children who asked, “Wow, you live in Alaska? What’s it like?” I never did well with that question. To me, the place I was visiting was far simpler and easier to describe than the one I was from. The Lower 48 seemed a fairly homogeneous land of freeways and fast food, a well-mapped network of established places. Alaska, on the other hand, wasn’t even completely explored. Natural forces of vast scale and subtlety were still shaping the land in their own way, inscribing a different story on each of an infinite number of unexpected places. Each region, whether populated or not, was unique far beyond my ability to explain. Alaska was so large and new, so unconquered and exquisitely real, as to defy summation.

This book offer a rich array of information on the use of punctuation and related symbols in modern literary Russian, and we have employed them as sources for writing the present book. Nevertheless, all of them (as well as the other books listed in the bibliography beginning on page 227) were written for educated native Russians and are accessible to only the most advanced non-native student.

The Russian press has undergone huge transformations in the years since the death of Konstantin Chernenko in early 1985. Every change at any level in Russia in the supervening period has been reflected in its press. Перестройка (Perestroika) has been followed by the economic ‘cold shower’ of early post-communism and then by the less dramatic but still inexorably transforming period of reform under successor prime ministers and presidents: all these have wrought tremendous changes in Russia’s political landscape.

It was another beautiful, sunny day on the planet Sunlight 349, as Lillian Belle set off on her latest assignment. If she was honest with herself, the fact that every day on Sunlight 349 was 'another beautiful, sunny day' was perhaps a little tedious. Mind you, whenever she had such thoughts, she would force herself to remember what life had been like for her parents. They had lived on the edge of starvation for the first thirty years of their lives. In squalor. On a freezing cold, polluted planet whose name no one even wanted to remember.

Balmoral Castle lay bathed in autumn sunshine. The light shone on the white stone of the castle's ivy-covered walls. It sent golden shafts through the tall windows. Captain Harry Carruthers, companion and aide to King Edward VII , marched along the red-carpeted corridors of the castle. He glanced through the window. It was a beautiful day. He sighed. On a day like this, the King would be sure to insist that he went outside and did something healthy.

The view on the monitors was dark. Occasionally, a line of numbers scrolled past, faster than any human eye could have followed them. But mostly, it was dark. It was dark, in a sense, all the time. But then, 'all the time' is a relative concept. A lot can happen in a slice of time too infinitesimally small to be measured on any human scale. So, occasionally there was a burst of frenetic activity. But mainly, it was dark.

He'd never intended to become a thief. Edgar Miller considered this as he wedged the end of his crowbar against the sill and began to prise open the sash window. He'd always planned to do something worthwhile with his life, to make something of himself. Life, however, had pointedly refused to provide him with any opportunities. For years he'd tried to earn an honest living, breaking his back with manual work, mucking out stables, fetching and carrying. In the end, though, where had that gotten him?

The rain splattered against the windscreen before the wipers swiped the glass clean, patting the water down into a splashy trough above the dashboard. Beyond, the car headlights picked out a narrow country lane rolling out of the darkness, the high hedges on either side giving it the feel of driving through a tunnel. Rebecca rubbed her forehead. Another headache. Probably due to the idiot who had spent the last five miles behind her, his headlights blazing away in her rear-view mirror.