An award in heaven should be given to those authors who update their good books every year until they are great books. Rick Steves’s guidebook on intelligent travel in Europe has been around decades, but it gets better with each yearly edition. That’s because for the past twenty years Steves has spent 130 days each year exploring new and re-exploring odd corners of the continent. From this wealth of experience he delivers not only the best guide to Europe, but the best general guide to smart traveling anywhere. I spent a decade full-time traveling myself, and these days I go to Europe once a month; this book has directed me to many specific towns or regions that retain distinctive cultures, places which would otherwise have taken me years of visits to find. Among the techniques Steves offers is a sort of laser traveling (head directly from the airport to the quintessential regions, skip the rest) which only works because he knows where to send you. There are a thousand hard-earned tips on cheap travel, on getting comfortable with a different way of doing things, and, bless his soul, he updates the darn thing every year with the latest prices. I consume travel books by the barrelful, including Lonely Planets, Rough Guides, and so on; this is the one to study, the one you want to re-read. It’s not about London and Paris; it is not a guidebook. It’s about how to make jokes in beginners’ Italian, or attend a wedding on a Greek island. With Steves’s guidance you can finally do that inexpensive grand tour of Europe you’ve always meant to do, or, better, bestow a roundtrip ticket and this book to a recent graduate and it’ll be as good an education as they’ve had.<\/p>\n