Peru is a remarkably interesting country. This is a pretty good guidebook. One area where the guide could be improved is advising tourists on itineraries that work up to high altitude gradually. The easiest trips to arrange go straight from Lima at sea level to sleeping in a hotel in Cusco at 11,000' above sea level. At best you won't feel good and at worst you could get acute altitude sickness. A bit of planning, however, and you can either zip straight from the airport at Cusco to Aguas Calientes below Macchu Pichu (about 8000') or work your way up to Cusco from some towns that are at 7000'. Simply by reshuffling your itinerary you can have a trip where you are feeling good and strong all the time rather than a trip where you stagger around breathlessly and suck down aspirin for the pounding headache.

If you're curious about Chelsea's pet frog, this is the book for you. Clinton talks about this animal and how he freed it in a river before moving to Washington, DC. He talks about his family and their struggles with obesity and alcohol and cocaine addiction. He talks about stopping at McDonald's for coffee towards the end of his morning jog back in Arkansas. He talks about some of the things that he did while President. What he doesn't talk about is whether, given the distance of a decade, these things turned out good or bad.

One thing that I took away from the book is Clinton's belief that he was the best-qualified person for whatever job he was seeking. Perhaps this is why we've had so many presidents from small towns in obscure states and surprisingly few from big cities. If you grow up as the only smart person in a tiny school you might subconsciously believe for the rest of your life that you ought to be elected governor, president, whatever. If, on the other hand, you grow up in Manhattan you might remember "hey, there were a bunch of folks in my old neighborhood who knew a lot more than I did and would probably do a better job." This might tend to sap your confidence.

If you have the stamina to wade through 1000 pages of minutia you still won't learn anything about government, foreign policy, or management. On the other hand if you're upset at our current president it might be good to read this book and realize that George W. has no monpoly on mediocrity.

I checked out the book's recommendations for two regions with which I'm familiar: Alaska and Massachusetts. In the case of Alaska the author recommends a couple of places that any 80-year-old on a cruise would be likely to visit. She does not mention Katmai National Park (where you can get up close and personal with bears catching salmon) or any of the other places that an Alaska resident might recommend. In the case of Massachusetts she recommends Legal Seafoods. This is a chain restaurant and if you're hungry in Washington National Airport it is a fine place to eat but it is hard to see how the various branches of Legal's qualify as one of the 1000 top places in the world.

One of the most idiosyncratic and creative films of our time. I went with three friends, two of whom were young people raised on a steady diet of popular Hollywood blockbusters. These two couldn't understand how such a movie could have been made, by whom it might be considered entertaining, or what it was doing in a public theater. If someone compares Jackson Pollack's work to a 2nd-grader's paintings this is not the right DVD for them!

This is a great DVD to watch with friends during an election year. We had a group of 15 people howling with laughter. You have to love a politician who closes a letter to a 7-year-old Vermont girl with the admonition "Don't do crack; it's a ghetto drug."

I read this one while traveling around Peru and the local experts confirmed the accuracy of Prescott's 150-year-old writings about Inca culture. Many of the most important actors in the book were surprisingly old considering the hardships that they endured. For example, Pizarro himself was 60 when he started heading down towards Peru through terrible storms in wooden boats, often getting stranded in mosquito-infested jungles without food for months at a time. He was 65 by the time he actually conquered Peru. One of the Pizarro family's most effective generals in their fights against other Spaniards was 80-84 during the period of these civil wars.

This book makes a great gift for anyone traveling to Ecuador or Peru and for anyone over the age of 60.

As a retired guy who likes to fly small airplanes I was prepared to enjoy this novel about a retired guy who likes to fly a small airplane. The multi-generational family story is nicely crafted and the author, despite being a young person, writes convincingly about a 59-year-old man's concerns. It would have been nice if the author had taken the time to have a licensed pilot review the manuscript. The portions of the book that deal with actual flying bear no relationship to reality. The main character, supposedly a fair-weather pilot, proceeds into clouds off the Connecticut coast instead of simply landing at one of the numerous airports that dot the shore or turning around and spending the night in the Boston area. The author notes that these clouds are not thunderstorms and yet the little plane is nearly ripped apart by turbulence. The pilot of the stricken airplane calls the control tower of his intended destination for an instrument clearance, rather than the nearby Providence Approach, which owns the airspace in which he was flying. The tower controller in the book gives the main character a clearance that requires him to follow the Long Island Expressway, which would be a neat trick if you were stuck in the clouds (in the real world pilots on an instrument flight plan fly from one radio beacon to the next). The grand finale is an instrument approach to a runway covered in fog, a heroic emergency maneuver that you would never attempt if you had a working airplane and enough fuel to fly another few minutes to an airport where the runway was not covered in fog.

If you're not an airplane nerd, however, you'll probably enjoy the book.

... because you will be inspired to visit Panama to see the Canal. Fortunately tourism in the Canal Zone has become much easier ever since the US withdrew from the country. Many of the exclusive areas formerly reserved for Canal personnel are now open as hotels, restaurants, and for general tourism. McCullough writes about the flood of tourism that attended the Canal's construction and opening. He is probably responsible for quite a bit of the modern Canal tourism!

The differences between the book and the movie are remarkable as other reviewers have noted but if you liked the movie that makes the book all the more interesting.

The book is set in the Hamptons and New York. The protagonist, Schmidt, is a 60-year-old WASP lawyer who retires from his law firm partnership when his wife becomes terminally ill. The wife is from an old rich WASP family and works as a literary fiction editor. Schmidt's daughter, a Harvard-educated yuppie who does PR for a tobacco company, is planning to marry a junior partner at Schmidt's old firm. This horrifies Schmidt partly because his future son-in-law doesn't read books or appreciate culture but mostly because the young lawyer is Jewish. Much of the book centers on Schmidt's horror at a formerly genteel world of New York law firms and Long Island beaches, now despoiled by an influx of Jews. The last half of the book is devoted to a romance between Schmidt and a 20-year-old half-Puerto Rican waitress, complete with a Hollywood happy ending.

The screenplay transplants the action to Omaha, Nebraska. Schmidt and his wife are middle class salt-of-the-earth types. There are no Jews in evidence. The daughter is living 1000 miles away and her future husband is objectionable to Schmidt because he's a "nincompoop" and his family, rather than being successful happily married Jewish psychiatrists, consists of divorced white trash-y New Age-y folks. The movie Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson, is unrelievedly sad and pathetic. There are no romances with young women for movie Schmidt (no romances with any women, actually).

Maybe we should give Hollywood for making a movie that is substantially darker than an already fairly dark novel.

The actual content of the book can be summarized thusly: (1) spend more time with kids if you want to affect their development, (2) don't starve young children because otherwise they won't develop properly physically and mentally, (3) run your not-for-profit enterprise just like a for-profit corporation and with just as much of a zeal for profits, except that you can put the profits into your own pocket as salary instead of paying it out to a bunch of shareholders and to the Federales as income tax.

Padding these ideas out to 300 pages requires that the author tell you how famous his friends are, each and every one of them, and how much do-gooding his few non-famous friends have done. There are also long stories about the escapades of his 13-year-old son.

Never does the author address the issues raised in the subtitle, e.g., how does a person balance his or her life between charity and selfishness? Shore's definition of "giving something back" is working at a multi-million dollar tax-exempt organization and paying yourself $400,000 per year. Nice work if you can get it but what about the rest of us?

For a thoughtful look at the issue of personal charity read the novelist Nick Hornby's "How to be Good".