Rick Steves' Postcards from Europe: 25 Years of Travel Tales from America's Favorite Guidebook Writer - Softcover

In Postcards from Europe, prolific guidebook author and public television host Rick Steves relates a recent trip across the heart of Europe. Departing from the guidebook format, Steves tells his story through Europe's people, often comparing a Europe he first came to know two decades ago with the one he sees today, a continent in flux.

Steves's enthusiasm for Europe races throughout his narrative as he travels to Amsterdam, the Rhine, Rothenburg, Munich, Venice, Florence, Rome, the Italian Riviera, the Swiss Alps, and Paris. In vivid and spirited vignettes, Steves meets a "Gen-X kid with two holes in his body for each one in mine" in a Dutch head shop, a German woman enraged about memories of World War II en route to Dachau's concentration camp, and a friendly priest at St. Peter's basilica. Full of cleverness and quips, Postcards from Europe is the readers' chance to tour with one of Europe's foremost guides. If "Good travel is like a dance," as Steves writes, then Postcards from Europe dances a lively jig. --Byron Ricks

Steves, travel writer and host of PBS's Travels in Europe, takes a nostalgic look at 25 years of European travel and cultural changeAfrom his first family trip abroad in 1969 (spent searching for pianos and visiting Norwegian relatives) to his years as a tour guide and his most recent solo expeditions. In a laid-back narrative style, Steves offers interesting cultural and historical tidbits on such cities as Amsterdam, Munich, Paris and Venice. Revisiting churches, museums, hotels, shops and restaurants, he notes with sadness the changes that have taken place over the past couple of decades, including the growing prevalence of American attitudes and the transformation of Rothenburg, Germany (one of Europe's best-preserved walled towns), from an off-the-beaten-path find to a tourist "theme park." Though Steves readily admits he travels in more luxurious style at age 42 than he did as a youth,, he makes it clear that neither money nor location by themselves makes a trip memorable: it's the people who count. Those who appreciate Steves's humorous insights on his TV programAas well as in his many guidebooksAwill enjoy settling back with him on this European tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.