Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology

Rating:
Summary: Phenomenal 2 Volume Set!
Review: Finally! A long overdue authoritative encyclopedia of cryptozoology! This set is awesome! There is so much information here that it'll take a veeery long time to digest it all.

I do have several suggestions though:
1) More photos and illustrations (especially photos and stills from film footage which are discussed, but not shown).
2) Dustjackets. The covers are gorgeous, but how long will they remain so without dustjackets? And at this price, you'd think the publisher could afford it. Which brings me to...
3) The price is outrageous. How can the publisher make any money by limiting it's buyers to libraries, rich people and fools like me? $60 sure, even $75, but $185? Jeez! And even though I paid WAY less than that for my set, it still almost killed by bank account.

Even so, I'm glad I bought it and wouldn't be without it.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Intersting Ecylcopedia
Review: I accidently stumbled upon this item while looking for anything on the Paranormal. The Book seemed very intersting and I bought it. The Price was a Killer, but it was worth it. It is set in 2 voulumes which is more like an Encyclopedia, but in the Final Sections of Volume Two mainly is Reference to all the New Species discovered in the 20th Century. Also in the real Final pages, are all Lakes that supposedly have Monsters in them like Lake Erie or Lake Champlain. I would recommend this Book for Reference, but not for reading from Start because like I said, it is more like an Encyclopedia than a Non Fiction Novel.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful catalog of crypto creatures etc!!!
Review: I have not bought this book, due to its price, but getting it from interlibrary loan, I must say I WANTED TO BUY IT! It covers absolutely every topic, many I was completely unfamiliar with, altho I have followed crypto since preteens!
It was well written many with pictures and or illustrations.
A great read, and great presentations of these mysterie. It is really two volumes also.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful catalog of crypto creatures etc!!!
Review: I have not bought this book, due to its price, but getting it from interlibrary loan, I must say I WANTED TO BUY IT! It covers absolutely every topic, many I was completely unfamiliar with, altho I have followed crypto since preteens!
It was well written many with pictures and or illustrations.
A great read, and great presentations of these mysterie. It is really two volumes also.

Rating:
Summary: a complete waste of $200.00
Review: I highly anticipated this book for almost a year (even previous to its publication). My wife begrudgingly bought me the book. It arrived yesterday and although it is two volumes, it is still not worth the paper it's printed on. I returned it the next day. About half of the work deals with mythical or supernatural creatures i.e. mermaids, unicorns, and the like. The other third of the book deals with WILD MEN of a particular region. I am so tired of wild men or ape/humanoid creatures flying in the face of evolutionary evidence. This isn't science, it is the National Enquirer. Also, Eberhart writes with very little skepticism, for example when he describes Patterson's film of Bigfoot he serves us a dollup of nonsense and speculation. Almost every educated and reputable scientist/investigator considers this film now a hoax. Also, the sections on loch monsters are nonsense as well. Population and lake biologists repeatedly consider these lakes harboring populations of "monsters" as silly. For two hundred bucks I expected thorough scientific scrutiny, not just field guide-type descriptions of cryptids. The most despairing problem with the book concerns the filler material to make the book two volumes. For instance, paragraphs and sometimes pages are wasted with alternate names for creatures. While this may be good for bibliographical research, it is a complete bore and waste for most of us who were hoping for a coffee table-type book with glossy pages and beautiful pictures or artwork. For two hundred, I also expected a more substantial and beautiful tome and more than just sixty or so pictures. Some of the more interesting possibilities like the giant anaconda were given paragraph status. The books would be sensibly priced at maybe forty dollars, not two hundred. It seems as if Eberhart spent the better part of two years hunting down articles or books and consolidated the information into 700 pages of mostly boring and uninspired reading. It would have been much more interesting if it had chapters on each purported cryptid or class of cryptid. Alternate names and descriptions that are long-winded and listed alphabetically do not make for interesting reading. I had expected to read the volumes cover to cover; instead I found myself just thumbing through the information for whatever seemed interesting. Good for bathroom reading, but not much else. Save one eighty and instead buy Matthew Bille's Rumors of Existence--if it could only be longer.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent-- though highly specialized-- reference
Review: If you are a follower of cryptozoology and a serious researcher on that subject, then this is a book that will not disappoint. It is as close to a total compendium as something of this nature could be. It is literally a must have book that compliments the works of Roy Mackal, Bernard Heuvelmans, Loren Coleman, John Green, Karl Shuker, et al.

The drawbacks-- mainly the price. It is clearly prohibitive to many who might otherwise "clear the shelves" to have this book (or books since it is two volumes).

Hopefully the price will come down and this wonderful book will become more widely available to interested parties.

Rating:
Summary: A collection of animals reported to exist at some point
Review: This two-volume set is a basic layman's guide to the weird, wonderful world of unknown animals. These are animals whose existence has not been proven at this time. While the idea that there may be animals, including some very large ones, living in the world and we have no proof of their existence might be strange to some people it was during my lifetime that gorillas and rhinoceroses were removed from the category of fables.

For each entry the editors provide information on its physical description, behavior, distribution, possible explanations, significant sightings, and sources. This is a non-judgmental review of the reports from around the world presented in a typical encyclopedic style. Although it contains primarily creatures reported to exist but not proven it also includes some animals like the Dodo bird, which were known to exist and are believed extinct. But, because there have been occasional reported sightings in recent years these animals are included.

ABC-CLIO, Inc. published some of the best educational materials of this type on the market today. As always Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology is a high quality reference work written at a high-school level and so is accessible to everyone. Mysterious Creatures is a highly recommended read for anyone interested in this area and a recommended purchase for libraries.