This may well be the shortest review I've ever written for the Nameless Zine, but then this is the shortest book I've ever read for the Nameless Zine. That's because it's a very unusual publication that I received as a very welcome Christmas gift.

If I'm counting correctly, there are only twenty-four pages, including the covers, and a good chunk of each of those pages, including the front cover, has been cut away, so that we can see part of ten of them just by looking through that gap. If that suggests a flimsy read, then I should add that each of these pages is notably thick, like a picture book for toddlers, and also large and square. In a way, it is a picture book, albeit accompanied with a little text, but it's appropriate for pretty much any age reader, as long as the youngest are old enough to understand geography.

The Highpoints of the title are the tallest points in each of the fifty states of the union. Every one of them is visible without even opening the book, so carefully arranged are those cutouts, though, of course, some of them are far more visible than others. According to the text, which is confined to the space at the bottom of each page and the back sides of each of the mountains, highpoints is an actual word, with highpointers those who enjoy highpointing, or climbing only highest points in the checklist they're following. Here, that's American states, so some of them don't seem like much at all.

Sure, a member of the Highpointers Club who has reached the highpoints in all fifty states, will be highly capable because they've climbed Denali, the 20,310 foot tall mountain in Alaska that dwarfs every other highpoint in this book and gets a page all of its own. Mount Whitney in California is the next tallest at only 14,498 feet, so it shares a page with Mount Rainier and Mount Elbert. I've seen the former from trips to Washington, but I hadn't even heard of the latter, which is in Colorado and the third tallest highpoint.

Of course, the list drops reasonably quickly, once we work through the next nine, which are mostly in the western states, including Arizona's highpoint, which is Humphreys Peak. The one exception is Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which the text points out is the tallest mountain on the planet if we count all of it, starting at its submerged base. However, it only reaches far enough to make it to sixth place on this list. Texas, which likes to think it's the top at everything, has the highest highpoint with four digits, Guadalupe Peak only 8,749 feet tall.

So far, so expected, because we tend to think of highpoints, whatever word we have for them, as the peaks of mountains, which we naturally want to climb. I've walked the Three Peaks in Cumbria and my niece is gradually notching off the other two hundred and eleven on the Wainwrights list, of the various fells in the Lake District, as listed in Alfred Wainwright's seven volume book, Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells. However, many of these highpoints really aren't high at all.

For instance, the elevation of Phoenix is 1,086 feet, meaning that I'm a thousand feet up just typing this review. That's higher than the lowest five highpoints, which can't really be called peaks at all, because they're more like mild bumps in the ground. The lowest is Britton Hill in Florida, which is a "wrinkle in the Earth's skin", as the text here has it, at only 345 feet. The Dushku brothers had fun writing their text, pointing out that the Empire State Building is taller than seven of the first eight highpoints that share the first page.

What makes this book so cool is that they start with the lowest, drawing each of them next to each other in ascending order and then cutting out a huge square above them to serve as a frame for a succession of pages with successively taller highpoints. That's why we can see the very top of each of them without even opening the book. That's clever design. Using the space behind them is more good design and the Dushku brothers also use it wisely, highlighting neat facts and providing some useful perspective.

There's a lot here for something that's really not very big at all, ironically given its subject matter. It's readable in next to no time, but it's also well worth coming back to for a second read, which the majority of books can't boast. I'm likely too old nowadays to think about joining the Highpointers Club and some of the highest are daunting indeed (as is the eighteenth, Mount Washington in New Hampshire, which boasts some of the highest wind speeds anywhere in the world), so I think I ought to settle for simply visiting each of these fifty states, as I only have fifteen or so to go. I can always be a highpointer vicariously through this book. ~~ Hal C F Astell