"In 1784, travel wrenched Thomas Jefferson out of the darkest period of his life. He sailed to France a broken man, but on the road, he rediscovered a world of hidden beauty and penned a guide he called Hints for Americans Traveling in Europe. During a crisis of his own, Derek Baxter dares himself to follow Jefferson's route. On a series of journeys (piloting a Dutch canal boat, hiking the French Alps, and fishing in the Atlantic), Baxter follows...

"When New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins moves to Geneva, Switzerland, she decides to learn French--not just to be able to go about her day-to-day life, but in order to be closer to her French husband and his family. ...At once a hilarious and idiosyncratic memoir about the things we do for love, and an exploration across cultures and history into how we learn languages, and what they say about who we are"--

"Tom Lutz is on a mission to visit every country on earth. And the Monkey Learned Nothing contains reports from fifty of them, most describing personal encounters in rarely visited spots, anecdotes from way off the beaten path. Traveling without an itinerary and without a goal, Lutz explores the Iranian love of poetry, the occupying Chinese army in Tibet, the amputee beggars in Cambodia, the hill tribes on Vietnam's Chinese border, the sociopathic...

"In Italy, in the heart of every town is a statue of Dante. My love of Italy, and my interest in the mysterious, led me, after years of considering it, to read The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. To say that it is mysterious is an understatement. As Dante explained in a letter to a friend: The subject of the work literally taken is the state of souls after death. Surprisingly Dante also promised to guide readers to a state of happiness in this life....

It's April in Italy and the Journey of a lifetime has just begun. After two weeks at sea the Oosterdam docked in Civitavecchia, Italy. Among the shipboard romantics was a not-so-young couple on their much-delayed honeymoon. Approaching their forty-sixth wedding anniversary, they had their hearts set on an Italian adventure they would have loved to have taken earlier in their marriage but matters of making a living, making a life, and raising children...

"Following her bestselling The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard returns with a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of W. G. Sebald and others of Rebecca Solnit, but it is Lessard's singular talent to combine this profound book-length mosaic--'a blend of historical travelogue, architectural tour, philosophical meditation, and prose poem'--into...