Travel book reviews: Viva South America!; DK guide to Great Britain & Ireland

By Clover Stroud Published: 1:18PM GMT twenty-two February 2010

Oliver Balch"s 12-month tour starts in Bolivia Photo: CORBIS

WHERE TO GO WHEN: GREAT BRITAIN & IRELAND

DK, �19.99

More transport book reviews Arts and enlightenment legal holiday ideas Travel books: The Roman Way; Hudson"s Historic Houses Travel books: Walking on the Brecon Beacons; The Reluctant Traveller Travel book: Paris and her Remarkable Women; Bradt"s Nova Scotia Travel books: The Glory of the Sultans and At the Water"s Edge

This is a glossy, large-format book masquerading as a guidebook, with copiousness of flattering pictures, but changed small information. A saved list of ideas for days out and weeks or weekends away, it is widely separated by season, and afterwards by thesis (Cities, Towns and Villages, Outdoor activities, Family Getaways…), with dual pages per thought and a short vegetable patch of poetry extolling, in mostly tasteless or cliched terms, the reasons to put up with a place or wake up (Canal Cruising, for example, provides "the undiluted decrease fix… an unbeatable approach of pity the perfect wish of travel"). Some report is great directories and a couple of contacts, hotels and places to eat per opening but it"s brief. This is a thin thought ready to go up: investigate online instead and save yourself �20.

Extract: "In 1665, the bubonic disease that was unconditional the nation arrived in the encampment of Eyam, in a gold of fine cloth that had been sent from a tailor in London. In a eminent act, the inhabitants of Eyam willingly quarantined themselves for sixteen months to forestall the disease swelling further. They were grateful for the uninformed H2O supposing by the encampment well, and the [August] well-dressing ceremony, as it well known today, was born."

VIVA SOUTH AMERICA!

By Oliver Balch (Faber �9.99)

South America is a land precious by backpackers seeking for tour but one whose mostly uneasy past still has a grave temperament on the present. Balch, who functions as an eccentric publisher in Buenos Aires, undertakes the daunting charge of running his reader opposite South America in a tour that took a year. He is a illusory writer, blending critical reportage with a genuine clarity of the people and places he encounters. His starts in Bolivia, snaking his approach opposite the nation with an considerable appetite and unrestrained for his subject, but conveying it all with still lyricism. Each nation is since a opposite theme, that he examines around his experiences, and the usually beating of this differently excellent book is that these themes are a small predictable. For example, his concentration in Argentina is on politics, in Brazil it"s on competition and in Colombia, inevitably, on violence. But this is a teenager oppose in an differently interesting and desirous book that creates for a rarely enchanting read, either you are formulation a outing there or not.

Extract: "A studious line of visitors waits in the object outward the bolted main embankment of Tacumbu prison. All, but exception, are women: submissive wives, girlfriends, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, mothers. Most have a grocery bag in hand. Few speak. We play ground on a side travel one retard away. The smell of uninformed vegetables and in progress fat wafts from the food stalls heading down to the prison"s entrance."