Travel

In a Sunburned Country' is Bill Bryson's humorous account of one astounding trip down under. He takes the reader across this sunburned nation (appropriately labeled as it fields the largest hole in the Earth's o-zone layer), in a travel documentary that is knowledgeable, entertaining and impressive. Bryson has a remarkable aptitude for Australian history. His depth of research and knowledge is presented in a series of clever anecdotes as he experiences the people and culture of this self-proclaimed 'forgotten' nation. The dry humor Bryson employs is witty but not overdone.

To really know a city, one has to walk its streets. This is especially true of London, where it seems that every second building has a plaque noting that the likes of Samuel Johnson or Charles Dickens had lived there or that some important event in the city's long history occurred on that site.

City Walks: London-50 Adventures on Foot is the latest in a series that has included similar publications for San Francisco, Paris and New York. City Walks is an interesting concept in that it is not actually a book, but a deck of cards.

Brooklyn: A State of Mind is not really a travel book with descriptions of tourist sights and accompanying fees and hours. Nor is it a history book that gives a detailed chronological time line of the city's growth, but rather this book is a collection of stories and tales as unique as the borough itself.

I lived in Brooklyn for the first 46 years of my life and the last few years we have lived in a suburb about 25 minutes away.

Author Patricia Schultz has compiled the world's best of the best to come up with the New York Times' bestseller 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. This 974-page book is the bible for serious travelers, containing every interesting place to visit and experience life, from the delicious Chicago hotdogs at Superdawg, to Count Dracula's Castle in Transylvania.

Each continent is broken down into sections, and each individual entry includes about a page or more of historical information and important tidbits, the exact location, best times to travel, prices and contact information.