Book: Dream Destinations

From Transylvania to Cape Town, Daytona Beach to China’s Huangshan Mountains, Dream Destinations:100 of the World's Best Vacations (Life Books; $30) takes you on a dazzling photographic journey to 100 of the coolest places on the planet. Having been to many of the locations mentioned, I found the selections well chosen, and suitable for a wide range of interests—the list includes museums, trails, cities, wilderness areas, cultural attractions, historical monuments, and more. The textual descriptions of each place are decent, though a bit more attention could have been paid to editing. For example, the Montana’s Dude Ranches section, which highlights Big Sky’s own 320 Ranch, refers to “West Yellowstone National Park”—anybody know where that is? And I could have done without the pop-culture references—I could care less if Lake Wanaka was mentioned in Mission Impossible III. Celebrity-obsession pandering and copy editors' mistakes aside, this is a good book, one to keep at handy for generating those off-season travel dreams.