Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent overview; good first book on building with stone
Comment: Compact and concise, John Vivian's "Building Stone Walls" is a book that you can take with you while collecting (or buying) stone for your project, preparing the location, and building your wall. It offers a good overview of stacking stone, as well as a couple of less common ways of using stone (re-channeling moving water, for example). Best of all, it has some very practical, timesaving tips, particularly advice about when it is necessary to start with a trench and gravel base and when it is not.
With our particular project - building a retaining wall with field stone recycled from decaying fences around our house in the Catskills - we found that Vivian's book did not include quite enough detail. He only supplies a few paragraphs on the construction of a retaining wall, though to be fair, what information he gives is practical. By itself, however, this would not have been enough to guide us through the project.
For more detailed information on retaining walls, we turned to "The Granite Kiss", "Stone in the Garden" and "The Art and Craft of Stonescaping." Keep in mind, however, that the latter two books are more lavishly illustrated, a cross between a how-to book and a coffee-table book, so you probably would not take them out in the field.
That said, if you have never worked with stone, and want to get an idea of what is involved in planning and preparation, finding and moving stone, and building a wall, Vivian's book is a practical and inexpensive book to buy first. Five stars for useful, concise information in a very usable format.
