Travel Books

I absolutely love this beautiful, well-designed calendar. Also, Amazon does a great job!

WOW, this is a compilation of four different civilizations, it includes ALOT of information on understanding how these ancient groups lived. I have learned alot of interesting facts every time I haved looked through the pages. The illustration in it is amazing, there is not a corner left empty in this huge book!

This book is recommended for ages 9-12, but my 6-year-old ate it up and my 4-year-old enjoyed it too. I bought it because my girls are going through a knights and castles thing, and this was recommended as a good place to learn about them. I thought we'd just read that section and put it on the shelf until the other subjects came up. Well my 6-year-old saw things differently. She loves this book. She loves the way it is laid out and what she is learning from it. She had no interest in Vikings or Romans or Egyptians before this, but now she wants more on all these topics. And it is a fun book for me to read too. It is reminding me of things I hadn't learned since I was a child, and the diagrams are so clear that maybe I am learning things better than I did when I was a child.

We've tried several recipes. So far we haven't been disappointed. It's amazing how much flavor is packed in a healthy meal!

Some cookbooks just give recipes. Others give advice that transcends recipes. This book does both. For example, the broiled salmon with miso glaze is so often made it opens to the page by itself. But the guide to fish -- which species/fisheries are endangered, which have mercury, which have omega threes -- the advice on what to look for at the fish store (etc.) are at least as useful as the recipe. The guide to roasting vegetables is another treasure: I grow asparagus because I love it; my wife makes faces when I steam it. But when I roast it (per instructions), she loves it as much as I do. Thank you for this book.

I've had this book for nearly a month and have prepared several of the recipes since I received it. Not only have the ideas I've found in the book kept me on track with my diet plan, but my family has enjoyed the food as well. My husband and two teenage children have all been very positive, and have commented that it doesn't seem like "diet food."

The book contains ideas for every meal, and several handy charts, such as a guide to roasting vegetables and a guide to cooking whole grains. The book contains lots of great ideas for cooking fresh vegetables, fruits, lean meats, and grains. For those who enjoy cooking from scratch, it is a great book.

This is such a great cookbook. There are a few recipes that call for ingrediants that you have to get at a specialty store but most you can get at a normal supermarket. The recipes are full of flavor and easy to prepare for the most part. Just looking through the book I get excited about cooking!

Overall, I really like this cookbook. I was looking for new, exciting dishes that didn't pile on the calories. This certainly delivers. I've only made a handful of recipes but have yet to be disappointed.

A must have whether or not your travel to Europe. If you do indeed go, read it before and during your trip. Other books are available; however, this one works really well and covers a wide swath or history - and thus interests.

I thought that I would receive this book a little sooner than I did. It did arrive within the shipping time, but it was a Christmas gift for someone and I didn't receive it until the 29th. In any case, the book is absolutely gorgeous. The pages are glossy, it is well constructed and from what I briefly read and saw, quite informative and well organized. It also was a good price for what you get. Thanks!

If you plan to travel Europe this book is a must have, especially if you are interested in history and the museums. It gives tips on how to get tickets without standing in long lines and other tidbits a tourist would not know. I found it to be very time saving and helpful. It definitely will increase my enjoyment while I'm on vacation.

I love reading the Rick Steves' travel books and was very pleasantly surprised by my new understanding of European History and how it relates to art after reading this book. Rick Steves puts everything into perspective and connects art and history in a clear and concise manner. As someone who didn't appreciate European History as a student, I have found this book to be a great tool to re-educate myself and feel I now have a better understanding of the art I will see while traveling in Europe!

I was searching for a book like this for months. Already a fan of Rick Steves, I picked this book up and was more than happy with my purchase. This is a fantastic book to learn history or to learn about art. I used it to read while traveling Europe, but would read it as a leisure read as well. The photos are impressive, but more impressive are the diagrams and timelines to help meld it all together.

Great, easy, fun read. We also love Terrific Trains by the same team. Well written, not one I mind reading over and over.

I bought this for a 5 year old that loves planes. And he LOVES this book! He carries it round and talks about how it was when he rode on a plane. Really great book for kids that have flown, will fly, of just likes planes.

you cannot go wrong with these - not too long for parents to read and kids love them. amazing how a simple book like this sparks their curiosity about airplanes and how they ask lots of intelligent questions about airplanes by reading this book. Very well done.

My 2 yr old granddaughter loves airplanes. She really liked this book.

My 36 mo old daughter has loved airplanes since the first day she went onto one. I think by now she must have been on one 22 times as we go back and forth between the caribbean, North America and Europe. I bought 2 books to help her understand more about them, and to add variety to her library at home. It's a very good book for both boys and girls.

We have three current travel books on Costa Rica - this one is by far the best. It provides a full range of options from budget to luxury. He gives detailed reccomendations,insights, and cultural background. And it just seems to provide more complete coverage than the other books.

Extremely happy with this guide book. It is very well organized and seems complete. The authors will tell you their favorite places as well as ones to avoid. Has phone numbers and websites (if available) for most of the hotels. Quite a few pictures included. Totally worth the money.

I bought both Lonely Planet and Moon to be able to get a nice perspective on my trip to Costa Rica. Unfortunately the Moon handbook was not as useful as Lonely Planet. In fact, by the middle of the trip I buried this book at the bottom of my backpack. The only thing I found useful in Moon's guide was its maps. Other than that, I would stick with purchasing Lonely Planet.

As a loyal Lonely Planet reader, I thought Moon would be as good or better, considering the reviews for the two. This book is written for the author's ideals only - anyone who is really into sportfishing and seeing exclusively expats while traveling. It does a poor job of listing the more budget-minded lodging and restaurants, and has little to no mention of info that would suit someone with cultural interest. All restaurants and lodging are "to avoid the Ticos, book here" or "try expat Chuck and Susan's pace, here". It would help someone book an entire trip to see other travelers traveling, and to go fishing. Disappointed, I went to the bookstore and paged through LP's older, more concise guide book, and was thrilled to see better descriptions, more color pictures, and more cultural insight. Moon's book also packs an extra 100 pages of Costa Rican history - something that is nice, but not necessary to take with me in a backpack trekking around the country.
Lastly, the author has an absurd overuse with superlatives! "This beach is the best in the country" and "the wildlife in this park is unmatched" - these are good descriptions, but when applied to every park and every beach, given that there are dozens, it makes it difficult for the traveler to make an informed decision to organize their best trip to Costa Rica.
Overall I was disappointed and will be buying a different guide book to take with me.

I just returned (7/08) from a trip to Costa Rica. My sister and I had the Moon guide as well as the LP. Although LP's guide bears an older copyright date, it was the Moon guide that seemed out of date, and it contained many errors, ranging from incorrect phone numbers, to badly out of date prices, to outdated hotel descriptions, to listing no-longer-existent tour and transfer companies. It basically became dead weight in the baggage.

An example: the Moon Guide discourages individuals from visiting the Aviarios del Caribe sloth rescue center, near Cahuita, alleging that it now only welcomes cruise ship groups. In actuality, my sister and I were warmly welcomed and given a wonderful tour -- a highlight of the trip. (And: the admission fee was much lower than what Moon listed.) Travelers following the Moon guide advice would miss out on a wonderful experience.

I don't know the author's actual research methods, but I sometimes had trouble believing he had personally visited many of the hotels and restaurances he describes; I suspect heavy reliance on user feedback.

Costa Rica is certainly changing fast -- in general, prices were significantly higher than either Moon or LP listed, and hotels tended to have been upgraded. Towns listed as not having banks, in fact do. I can't believe, though, that all the changes we saw had happened just in the year or two since the Moon guide was supposedly updated.

very short guide showing the most important places and useful especially at the beginning to find a place in the park while driving. But this is all. Not much further information.

We just took a 12 day trip out west and both Yellowstone and The Grand Tetons were part of our itinerary. I found that this book added nothing to our trip. We also purchased Yellowstone Treasurers by Janet Chapple. This book was excellent and greatly enhanced our enjoyment of the park. She provided some information about areas outside of the park and her coverage of The Grand Tetons was as deep as this book. I would not recommend this book.

This book was a birthday gift. What a wonderful friend I have! We spent nine days in Yellowstone NP and we used this book and "A Ranger's Guide to Yellowstone Day Hikes" the entire time. Depending on where you are starting from, you will read the maps from top to bottom or from bottom to top and it can be confusing, but still worth purchasing! We had 6 guide books with us but the other four were not used during driving. This guide also shows you areas where you may want to pull over and explore along the route.

The title says it all, if you are doing any kind of travel around the park past the major sites, you must have this map. It shows elevation changes, more details than the standard map given at the park entrance. It's as helpful as any guidebook. And made of a very durable and waterproof material.

I just returned from Yellowstone and the Tetons. I used this book throughout my trip. It is clear, easy to use and well-written. The left hand page is a map of a short distance, say 14 miles, the right hand tells you about the sights. I used it in conjunction with a more detailed book (Moon guide), and found both useful in tandem. The only drawback is that it assumes you are entering the park from the West Entrance, so I had to use stick on notes to guide myself backwards by numbering the stick-ons in the order of my route. It was no big deal and hardly a reason not to buy the book. Two thirds of the annual 3 million visitors enter via the west, so you can understand the authors' reasons.

I've always liked the Eyewitness Travel Guides for their great photos, maps, narrative and tidbits. This one lives up to the series' standard. And these books make a great keepsake after your trip.

We had one week in Geneva and this guide pretty much explained everything there was to see. Well written, easy to use, very well organized, it was possible to get a handle on any large Swiss city in about 30 minutes.

I had purchased a similar book for my son about France to help him with his French language courses in high school. I ended up spending more time with it than he did, and when I saw the other country titles, I decided to purchase a few more. The Switzerland book is excellent in that it condenses a lot of information into a very portable volume. The photos and illustrations are fabulous and the background historical and cultural information is superb. The listing of accomodations and restaurants also appears to be very well researched and provides a starting point for further Internet research. My favorite part of Switzerland is the Bernese Oberland, and this book provides a genuine sense of what it is really like. I can definitely benefit from this book on future travel to Switzerland. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know more about the country, as well as for experienced travellers. Well done to the authors, editors, and publisher!

I'm not a seasoned or jaded traveler ... yet! So a comprehensive travel guide is critical to my preparation for a trip and a great way of post-filling information and details into some of the holes or places that I might have missed or had to rush through when I was actually on the trip. Along with photographs and trip journals, they're also a wonderful way to resurrect detailed memories of a trip long after you've returned home.

Eyewitness Travel Guides seem to have the market beat by a long margin! That's not to say that Lonely Planet, Frommer, Michelin or the Blue and Green Guides miss the mark entirely but the Eyewitness series, in general, seems to be more informative. The photographs and illustrations instill a higher degree of keen anticipation and provide a better means of choosing in advance between a world of competing destinations and alternative tourist attractions.

Their guide to Switzerland, in particular, was astonishingly accurate and complete - history, food, travel, hotels, geography, destinations, estimated costs, highlights, outdoor activities - every last one of them spot on and accurately described from the perspective of an actual trip through St Moritz, Lucerne, the Bernina Pass to Tirano, Italy and Interlaken. Even now the photographs of Swiss cuisine and cheese can set my mouth to watering!

One noteworthy omission that my traveling companion and I discovered by accident - Switzerland offers a museum pass for 30 Swiss francs that will give admission for one month to virtually every museum in the country. That's a remarkable offer given that the countryside is positively littered with a host of attractive museums, castles and attractions most of which charge a 5 to 10 franc admission. We learned that little tidbit from the concierge of the Palace Lucerne Hotel - kudos to the hotel for over the top service and a great piece of advice!

With that one small suggestion for addition to future editions, the Eyewitness Travel Guide to Switzerland easily earns a five-star review. And Switzerland, by the bye, is certainly a delicious five-star travel destination!

Paul Weiss

Pros: this guidebook has lots of pictures and gives lots of information region by region, detailed cut-outs of major historical buildings. I also found the pictures in the survival guide section useful, where they describe the various Swiss dishes and food/drink products.

Cons: no information on how to get to different places by train (e.g. from Interlaken to Schilthorn or Jungfraujoch). I understand the guide cannot list train numbers and times, but at least it could have described how to, for example, get from Luzern to Mt. Titlis by train. Train travel is a big part of the Switzerland experience so this seems like a big omission. There's also not much information on hiking, even though this is a very popular country with hikers. An overview map of hiking trails would have been useful. However, there are other guides that cover hiking so this is a minor omission by comparison.

The version with a black & white photo of a boy on the cover (ISBN 1438245416) has the wrong description from Amazon--it doesn't have facsimile pages of the original manuscript. But it's a beautifully designed edition at a very low price for the large size (6"x9"--unlike the small mass market paperbacks). It's also printed on high-quality paper--not newsprint like the other versions. A great bargain at this low price.

This was a required reading for my son's class at school. Although he enjoyed the story line, the use of the local slang (written out phonetically ) was difficult for him to read and distracting to the story, he felt.

I have heard about many of the essays included in this text and was excited to find that I could get them all in one book. I love the footnotes for additional information and the fact that the essays include both sides to teaching this book. I highly recommend for anyone who needs to know more about this classic text.

I was introduced to this book back in high-school (in Australia), where my English Literature teach (who was an American) used this as one of our set texts. Despite this, I really enjoyed it, and now, near 20 years later, I picked it up in some second hand book shop for $1.50 and got engrossed in it all over again.

Mark Twain (not his real name) sailed the Mississippi river as a riverboat pilot early in his career, and the truth of his depiction of people and way of life in this novel shines through, despite the fanciful nature of the adventure. I couldn't help but get caught up in the crazy tale of Huck Finn, hopeless trouble-magnet that he is, as he struggles to get free of his troubles with the less-than-helpful assistance of a large cast of characters.

The language is a joy to read. The characters are fun to follow. And although the plot isn't the most complex, the characters themselves do a fabulous job of making the simple into convoluted mayhem. Several times I had to laugh out loud at the absurdity.

Even though I picked this book up cheap, it's well worth hanging onto. I can easily see myself re-reading this again - hopefully before another 20 years pass!

You'll notice pretty quickly when you pick this up that Huck doesn't spell too good and his grammar isn't so hot either. But if you look a little more closely, you find that he sure knows how to use the semi-colon, and his sentence structure is picture perfect. Mr. Twain may have decided that he was going to have some fun with his charming narrator, but he sure wasn't going to sacrifice good writing to do so.

The novel, as everyone knows, is a masterpiece, and works splendidly on every level. Plot, character development, theme; everything is here. Anybody reading this review has probably read the book several times and moreover has probably read about it a dozen more so it's pretty certain that my little review is not going to add much. I would, however, like to comment on something which struck me while reading it most recently, which is how richly it evokes middle America of the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, as well as being literature of the first rank, Huckleberry Finn also functions as a thorough and fascinating historical document of a time and place that every year sinks deeper and deeper into our collective memory.

Here he is describing Uncle Silas' place in Arkansas upon seeing it for the first time. "It was one of these one-horse cotton plantations and they all look alike. A rail fence round a two-acre yard; a stile made out of logs sawed off and up-ended in steps, like barrels of a different length, to climb over the fence with . . . some sickly grass-patches in the big yard, but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old hat with the nap rubbed off; big double log house for the white folks--hewed logs with the chinks stopped up with mud or mortar, and these mud stripes been white-washed some time or another; round log-kitchen, with a big, broad open but roofed passage joining it to the house . . . hound asleep there in the sun; more hounds asleep round about . . . outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch; then the cottonfields begins, and after the fields the woods."

The first thing that strikes you about this is how . . . impoverished this all is, especially compared to how we live today. And this is a cotton-field owner with a number of slaves! But this was the south: rural, poor, hot, languid. Oh, yes, we are all familiar with the palatial southern mansion from novels like Gone With the Wind; I suspect that most of the South in the 1840s was closer to Huck's description than to Margaret Mitchell's.

Here's Huck's description of the town in which the King and Duke put on their first show: "The stores and houses was most all old, shackly, dried-up frame concerns that hadn't ever been painted; they was set up three or four feet above ground on stilts, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was overflowed. The houses had little gardens around them, but they didn't seem to raise hardly anything in them but jimpson-weeds, and sunflowers, and ash-piles, and old curled up boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and played-out tinware . . . There was generly hogs in the garden, and people driving them out." Charming, eh? Of course, we in our modern twenty-first century aren't immune to such slovenliness. Sometimes, historical descriptions remind us that things don't change much.

Along with his brilliant observations of humanity and the human habitat the novel also contains breathtaking descriptions of nature, especially the Mississippi River. There's heavy timber on the Missouri side, mountains on the Illinois side, the lights of St. Louis: "We run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a towhead . . . Next we slid into the water and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we sat down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywhere--perfectly still--just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a cluttering, maybe. The first thing you see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--and that was the woods on t'other side." How wonderfully evocative this is; how it makes one ache to experience such things!

Again, the novel is so much more than this. I'm not going to bother with the theme and the plot and the characters--what else is there to say?--but I can not finish this without giving an example or two of the wonderful humor contained in here. Here's the charming Huck after sneaking into the circus under the tent: "I ain't opposed to spending money on circuses when there ain't no other way, but there ain't no use in wasting it on them." And when the King and the Duke run on hard times: "First they done a lecture on temperance, but they didn't make enough for them both to get drunk on. Then, in another village, they started a dancing-school; but they didn't know no more than how to dance than a kangaroo does, so the first prance they made the general public pranced in and pranced them out of town . . . "

Oh, how rich this is. Rich and funny and lovely and hilarious. Read it for the pure entertainment contained in here, if nothing else.