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

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