Summer time is coming, and this is the best time to visit England, Ireland and Scotland.  Here is a list of new books that can help you plan every aspect of a trip to the region - from travelling with kids, to shopping, to woodland strolls.

The Rough Guide to Walks in London & Southeast England by Judith Bamber and Helena Smith (Rough Guides) outlines green places to stroll in England's capital city (parks, gardens and along canals, rivers and railway tracks) as well as day trips using public transportation. Destinations include the Eden Valley, the Saxon Shore, Cambridge and Stonehenge. Each walk includes a map, route details, history and recommended dining spots. The book bills itself as the perfect guide if "you're looking to get your boots muddy but don't ever want to be too far from a pub."

Take the Kids: Ireland by Amy Corzine (Cadogan Guides) can help you find child-friendly accommodations and eateries while planning a trip that everyone in the family will enjoy. Attractions include tours of Dublin in vintage Second World War amphibious vehicles known as Ducks that drop into the Grand Canal Basin after a land tour; the Clara-Lara Fun Park in County Wicklow; the Dunmore Cave in Kilkenny; and the Galway Children's Theatre in Salthill. "A story to tell" is provided on every page, relating Irish folklore and fairytales about various sites.

The London Shopping Companion by Nicki Pendleton Wood (Cumberland House) lists the best locations and prices for your shopping trips, along with maps, where to stay and eat, listings for one-of-a-kind collectibles, and tips on local transportation and payment options. The book lists not just clothing stores but everything from the London Dolls House Company to Spink, a 350-year-old purveyor of stamps, coins and medals, to James Smith and Sons, an emporium for walking sticks and umbrellas.

The Edinburgh Visitor Guide is packed with colourful photographs (by Colin Baxter), history and practical information you'll need in planning a trip to Scotland's capital city. The book includes listings for pubs, restaurants, museums, shops and historic sites like Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyrodhouse, as well as nearby attractions outside the city like Linlithgow Palace and the Scottish Seabird Centre.

England by Guy Macdonald is a comprehensive manual that offers themed itineraries, maps, a list of the country's top 60 attractions, and recommendations for hundreds of places to stay and eat. Listings offer both history and practical information, from Thomas Hardy's birthplace cottage in Thorncombe Wood to the picturesque Lake District to the sites of royal London.

April, 2004

Raffles Hotel

Raffles Hotel written by Gretchen Liu and published by Didier Millet.

Anyone interested in the history of Singapore and Asia will find Raffles Hotel essential and enjoyable. Lavishly illustrated with photographs, letters and artefacts from the Raffles Hotel Collection as well as specially commissioned photographs, Raffles Hotel takes the reader through the history of the legendary institution and, by association, the history of Singapore itself.

Raffles Hotel is not only about Singapore; it is about the personalities, adventurers, entrepreneurs, authors, heads of state and celebrities who have made their way and continue to make their way through the hotel. This book offers its readers a unique perspective on all these histories.

To the Kwai - And Back

To the Kwai - And Back: War Drawings 1939-1945 is written by Ronald Searle is well known as a cartoonist and the creator of St Trinians School. From 1939-45, he was a volunteer in the British Army and from 1942-45 a POW in Singapore and on the Thai-Burma Railway. Despite the harsh conditions in captivity, he often managed to continue to draw. The 170 or so drawings of his wartime experiences in this volume are set into context with the use of supplementary text. Together, they convey in a uniquely telling and memorable way what these searing experiences were. To the Kwai - And Back: War Drawings 1939-1945 is a Bibliography.

Hansen´s Travels

THE BIRD MAN AND THE LAP DANCER: Close Encounters With Strangers by Eric Hansen. The intrepid San Francisco-based traveler, author of Orchid Fever, can spin a good yarn, knowing how to go beyond the externals of exotic and not-so-exotic locations to get to the heart and soul of a place.

Stranger in the Forest - Eric Hansen was the first Westerner to make the perilous crossing of the island jungles of Borneo. Befriended by the Penan rainforest tribe - who catch fish with their feet - he hunted pigs, discovered eye-watering sex aids, and was ceremonially named King of the Moustache; more profoundly, he ´came face to face with myself in the patch of the map marked Unsurveyed´. Here is a true traveller´s tale, a deeply memorable portrait of a little-known corner of our world.

Motoring with Mohammed - It was a terrifying storm that left Eric Hansen and his four companions shipwrecked on a deserted Red Sea island. Rescued by smugglers and taken to the Yemeni coast, Hansen was enthralled by this little-known land, intrigued by its customs, charmed by its natural beauty and captivated by its people - from qat-chewing mystics to gun-smuggling goatherds and mind-boggling bureaucrats. Evocative and irreverent, affectionate and absurd, here is a journey through one of the world´s least understood countries by one of its finest travel writers.

New York's 100 year old boroughs

For the past 100 years, billions of New Yorkers have vanished from the city´s sidewalks and into a hole in the ground.

Is nothing more sinister than that they entered the New York Subway, the vast and complex system of trains, tunnels and tracks, and stairways and stations whose growth under the ground has fueled the city´s growth above the ground.  What began a hundred years ago with one 22-mile line between City Hall and the then-bucolic Bronx has grown into a maze of 27 routes that reach into four of the city´s five boroughs, a total of nearly 700 miles — about the distance to Chicago. Oct. 27, 2004.

Here are some new books to marks the subway´s centennial.  Join in the celebration:

• New Yorker Stan Fischler, perhaps better known as a sportscaster and hockey writer, has been riding the subway for more than 60 years. In The Subway and the City: Celebrating a Century (Frank Merriwell, Inc.), written with John Henderson, Fischler offers plenty to read about and to look at in a 547-page book crammed with text and more than 375 images, including archival photos of trains, stations, and construction of subway and elevated lines.
• Two words you don´t often hear together are in the title of Subway Style (Stewart, Tabori & Chang).  In this book you can find just about everything found in the city's subway and elevated lines: trains, stations, bridges and kiosks; station details, including tile work, furniture, turnstiles, lighting, vending machines and agent booths; and graphics applied to information signs, advertising, maps and MetroCards. Many of the items are from the museum's collection.
• A colorful little scrapbook of subway history and memorabilia is found in Subways: The Tracks That Built New York City (Clarkson Potter). With the help of archival photographs, artifacts, and interviews with New Yorkers, Lorraine B. Diehl explains how the subway was designed and built, and explores its role in the lives of New Yorkers.
• On an average weekday, the subway serves 4.5 million riders. A few of them have had their images captured in the 77 color photos in Peter Peter´s The Subway Pictures (Random House). In the photos, riders nap, read a book or newspaper, fix their makeup or stare blankly into space on their way to wherever. One guy plays an accordion, another crochets, another holds a canned drink. All are everyday New Yorkers, photographed by Peter with a simple 3-megapixel camera during the three years since the Sept. 11 attacks.

More New York Subway Books: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Legacies of the American Farm

Jane Brox has just published her new book, "Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm".  It is, generally, a brief history of American farming, from the origins of colonization to the present eradication of farming as a way of life in New England.  Brox balances this big issue by focusing, autobiographically, on her family´s own farm in the Merrimac Valley, and her experiences in trying to leave the land, and coming back to the land.

The book is also autobiographical in that if follows her travels, including her sojourn on the island of Nantucket, during her escape from New England farming. The book is also a fascinating glimpse of a little-remarked upon element of New England farming - the farming experience of immigrants who brought their cultural fingerprints (including their unique vegetables) to the New England landscape.  The book is, overall, a different telling of American history. We have become accustomed to history that relates the move west as a symbol of manifest destiny. It is somewhat strange to have the story of westward expansion baldly explained as the failure of New England to provide a subsistence existence for its farmers.

While we generally know that the New England mill towns tapped farm girls for their labor, we rarely contemplate the effect of this on the farms they left behind. And today, perhaps we don´t think seriously enough about the security of our food supply, which is now firmly in the hands of agribusiness, trucking companies and distant supermarket chains.

This is a book that will really make you think.

The Flying Visits Series

Cadogan has a reputation for publishing informed, cultured, conversational guides. How, then, to translate that style into a series for the time-pressed short-break traveller? Flying Visits is the answer.

Launched tentatively last year with guides to France, Italy, and Spain, the series is now being fleshed out with new guides to Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia and Switzerland. The books are structured around airports served by budget airlines. There is just about enough coverage of places such as Dublin, Geneva, Stockholm and Berlin to see you through a weekend. But if that is all you want out of them, you will be better served elsewhere (the new Directions series from Rough Guides, for instance, or the AA’s often overlooked CityPack series). Here, though, there are also detailed itineraries to get you out of town for a day or a long weekend, including places to see, shop, eat and sleep.

Flying Visits series were edited by Linda McQueen.