Winter Bookings The best new reads for the armchair traveler on your holiday gift list
By Paul Lukas

(MONEY Magazine) – On Feb. 15, 1988, some friends and I went to a ski resort. I remember the date because it was one of the most humiliating days of my life. I had always thought of myself as coordinated, even athletic, but skiing was somehow beyond my abilities--I fell while going down the hill, I fell while trying to stop at the bottom of the hill, I even fell off the lift. The inevitable improvement that I assumed would take place once I got the hang of things never happened. By the end of the first day, it had become abundantly clear that I would never ski again.

I tell this story because skiing is one of the first things people think of when considering winter travel. The other thing they think of is a tropical island, which frankly doesn't appeal to me either. I'm even worse at lying on a beach than I am at scooting down a snow-covered hill. With my cold-weather travel options therefore limited, I've found that winter is the perfect time to settle down with a book. I can research new destinations and fantasize about where to go when the weather gets warmer. And this happens to have been an excellent year for travel reading. So without further ado, here are my picks for the best travel books of the past 12 months (any of which, incidentally, would make a fine holiday gift), including guides, travelogues and one rather unique volume that--well, you'll see.

1000 Great Rail-Trails: A Comprehensive Directory (Globe Pequot Press, $14.95). As railroad activity continues its steady decline across America, more and more corridors of track become abandoned--about 2,000 miles' worth a year. One of the more interesting recent travel trends is the conversion of these derelict rights-of-way into public recreational trails. Some rail-trails are rough gravel and others are paved, allowing for a diversity of use--hiking, biking, in-line skating, snowmobiling, cross-country skiing, even horseback riding. This 50-state guide offers by far the most thorough coverage of this growing phenomenon.

Traveling with Your Pet: The AAA PetBook, Second Edition (AAA Publishing, $13.95). Sometimes the most stressful part of a trip isn't the race to the airport or the discovery that the hotel has misplaced your reservation--it's figuring out how to bring along Fido or Mittens. This well-organized guidebook, which features listings for over 10,000 pet-friendly lodgings, is far from the only book of its type, but it has an unbeatable edge over its competitors: It's published by AAA, which is already in the business of assessing and rating accommodations. So instead of just learning that a given hotel permits dogs to stay overnight, you'll also see how the hotel fares on AAA's well-established diamond rating system. In addition to listings, the book also provides information on the practicalities of pets traveling by car and by plane, pet insurance and where to find an animal clinic on the road.

Road Swing by Steve Rushin (Main Street, $12.95). Originally published in 1998 and now available in paperback, this isn't just one of the funniest travelogues ever written but is also a must for any sports fan on your holiday gift list. Rushin, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, spent the better part of a year on the road, driving thousands of miles to sports-related sites--Larry Bird's childhood home, the Louisville Slugger factory, the cornfield where Field of Dreams was filmed--and maintained a boyish enthusiasm the whole way. "I wanted to put my finger on the pulse of American sports," he writes, "and I wanted that finger to be one of those giant, foam-rubber index fingers worn by pinhead sports fans across the land." Hilarious and insightful from the first page to the last.

See the USA: The Art of the American Travel Brochure by John Margolies and Eric Baker (Chronicle, $19.95). Anyone who fondly remembers the beautiful travel brochures of yesteryear, with their glittering promises of perfect vacations, will enjoy this lavishly illustrated book. As you look at the lovely cover art from more than 200 brochures, originally published in the early and mid-1900s by local tourism bureaus, it becomes apparent that sometimes the most enjoyable trip is the drive down memory lane. Is Kentucky really "Where Hospitality Is a Tradition"? Is Reno truly "The Fun Center of the West"? Is Liberal, Kans. "The Pancake Hub of the Universe"? Yes, yes and yes, at least in these unabashedly nostalgic pages.

Yellowstone-Grand Teton Handbook by Don Pitcher (Moon Travel Handbooks, $14.95). Fodor's and Let's Go have higher profiles, but Moon, a small California operation, has quietly established itself in recent years as America's finest travel guidebook publisher, with a backlist that now features dozens of reasonably priced guides to various states, regions and foreign countries. Extensively researched, engagingly written, intelligently indexed and packed with helpful maps and sidebars, this excellent guide to Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks is a fine example of Moon's commitment to high-quality travel publishing.

Coastal California by John Doerper (Compass/Fodor's, $21). Fodor's line of Compass American Guides runs a close second to Moon, and this award-winning book, now available in a new revised edition, is among the top entries in the series: good, solid advice on what to see, where to stay and where to eat when traveling along the California coast. Like all of the Compass volumes, this one features unusually high production values for a guidebook, including premium paper stock and magnificent photography. First rate.

Roads: Driving America's Great Highways by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster, $25). Most writers extolling the virtues of the open highway, myself included, tend to focus on rustic back roads and two-lane blacktops. But McMurtry, the Pulitzer-winning novelist and used-book fanatic, takes a different tack: He favors the Interstates--which are derided by most writers as sterile and boring--and devotes this book to driving as many of them as possible. Instead of offering traditional travelogues (after all, how much can you say about a five-hour haul on I-35?), he uses the freeways as springboards for ruminations about the history--especially the literary history--of the regions he's traversing. A drive past William Allen White's birthplace in Emporia, Kans., for example, sparks an observation on White's fading reputation. Although the Interstates still hold no appeal for me, McMurtry's thoughts about writers, books and regions make him a fascinating guide. And his mood shifts, from cranky to sentimental to excited to numb, will ring true for anyone who has ever driven long stretches with nobody else in the car.

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong by James W. Loewen (Simon & Schuster, $15). I love historic sites and markers (see last month's Lost in America), but it's worth remembering that historical accounts are often written by people with political agendas and that truth sometimes suffers as a result. In this state-by-state guide, Loewen, a certified curmudgeon, gleefully points out error after error at America's historic sites, skewers popular myths that have mistakenly become enshrined as facts, points out assorted anti-minority biases and generally provides a massive reality check for any history-minded American. Did you know, for example, that the structure billed by the National Park Service as Lincoln's birthplace cabin was actually built 30 years after his death? It's true! "There's a critical distinction between what happened in the past and what we say about it," he writes. "The former is 'the past,' the latter 'history.'" By bringing that distinction to the fore, Loewen helps make us all more thoughtful travelers.

Birdwatching (Discovery/Insight Guides, $19.95). Over the past few years, the Discovery Channel has published a superb series of travel guidebooks devoted to individual hobbies and passions, and this is the best one so far. Beautifully photographed and written in a style that should appeal to experts and novices alike, the book provides detailed profiles of over two dozen prime birding sites, with information on which species can be seen during which seasons, where to find nearby lodging, and commercial tour availability. There's also basic info on birding techniques and equipment, and birding on the road.

Noodling for Flatheads by Burkhard Bilger (Random House, $24). Here's one you won't find in the travel section, which is a shame, because this remarkable collection of essays is nothing less than a tour through the underbelly of the South, where guidebooks fear to tread. Each chapter is devoted to a different old-time Southern rural tradition that has almost vanished but is stubbornly hanging on as a sub-sub-subculture--moonshining, cockfighting, shooting marbles, eating squirrels. The result is a portrait of a region that hasn't surrendered to modernity quite as much as the local chamber of commerce would have us believe. Bilger has no background in any of the rituals he's documenting, so he experiences them much as we would--sometimes enraptured, sometimes repulsed, always fascinated. Oh, and the book title? It refers to fishing for catfish with nothing but your hands and fingers.

Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti (Dial Press, $18.95). This is the brilliantly told true story of Paterniti's cross-country road trip, accompanied by the doctor who autopsied Albert Einstein and removed his brain--with the brain itself stowed away in the trunk for the entire drive. Yes, really. In addition to describing the trip's many humorous moments (including some positively surreal encounters with motel desk clerks), Paterniti makes two basic points: First, traveling with Einstein's brain utterly recontextualizes everything you see along the way because you instinctively try to imagine how Einstein would have seen it and thereby find unexpected revelations. And second, what's unwritten but clearly implicit in the text, is that America is so vast and interesting that you need not have Einstein's brain on hand to have these revelations--you just have to allow yourself to experience the landscape with fresh eyes and ears. Einstein's brain, in other words, is already lurking in the trunk of everyone's car. It's just a matter of realizing that it's there.

Award-winning writer Paul Lukas hasn't written a travel book--yet.