Glob: Library

Current, Actionable, Complete, Efficient - for 1st timers

Not quite a tourists' yellow pages nor quite a piece of literature on Italian history, Rick Steves' Italy 2008 had everything (almost) we needed and nothing we didn't in order to plan and execute our first Italy trip. My wife and I used this book for planning our trip and found ourselves carrying it everywhere we went during the trip.

From form factor to content organization, the book reflects a certain level of maturity in writing and editing a travel book. The names of hotel and restaurant owners provided the much needed personal touch and ice breaker; little side notes minimize surprises due to benign mistakes in new places that have a way of ruining good vacations; current information on trains, tours, hours, fees, phone numbers and maps take away the need to collect flyers as soon as you get to a new place. The book seems to have the right mix of information and opinion.

Don't use the book for self-guided tours at museums. Information about Tuscany is minimal and sub-par compared to rest of Italy. Focused tourists (say second time Italy visitors) may not get everything they are looking for. For hotel reservations, we cross-checked the book's suggestions with consumer reviews on TripAdvisor.com and found that to be very useful. Other than that, you should be pretty well covered.

Travelogedy

Like all good travelogs, this one is romantic and personal. It is more than just the story, yet less than the biography, of Chris McCandless. Jon Krakauer establishes his credentials as a biographer of a misunderstood recluse, and passionately defends the confused genius of a youth obsessed with answering (or even knowing the answers to) the larger questions of life. The intensity and depth of the youngster who called himself Alexander Supertramp is special. He could well have and should have lived through the summer of 1992 in Alaska.

The simplicity of the goal to "live off the land for a while" makes it easy to pass judgments on, for newbies, rookies, regulars, experts, or veterans alike. That's exactly what makes this story and this book an interesting read. It would be silly to typecast him into any one bucket, whether one might appreciate his unique ideologies or not. Although the book does a great job of hero-worship with substance, it sometimes misses coherence and dabbles more into the he-said-she-said than is required. It will be interesting to see how Jon Krakauer and Sean Penn handle it in the movie scheduled for release later this year.

Man in the Middle East

If National Geographic stories reconstructing a stone-age human from its fossilized remains dug out of the ashes of a volcano (such as in physical anthropology) fail to engage your fascination, chances are that this story will seem more academic to you than the home work assignment to watch History Channel. I am one such history-averse person and the book was too slow to start. However, I finished it with a renewed respect for social anthropology and its relevance to the world we live in. The way a story of a 12th century Egyptian trader can be relevant to the social, cultural, political and business of our times is hard to ignore and not take heed of. Besides, it is fascinating to learn how a small set of information sources with varying degrees of reliability can be connected like dots that reveal the story of a 800 year old human life in all its aspects.