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"Rome: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman&amp;#039;s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert. This new memoir is a look outward and inward as Gilbert recovers from a divorce by spending a year overseas. The time she spends in Rome learning Italian is only part of the story, but it will make you want to get there fast and replicate her experience. Venice: The World of Venice, by Jan Morris. No one does a better job of capturing the melancholy magic of this city than veteran travel writer Morris. It was last revised more than 10 years ago, but still has so many good insights that it&amp;#039;s the first thing to read if you&amp;#039;re going there, or even if you&amp;#039;re not. Montreal: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, by Mordecai Richler. Montreal may be the closest thing to France on this continent, but its Orthodox Jewish community also contributes to the special character of this culturally diverse and cosmopolitan city. Richler knew of what he wrote: He grew up in this ethnic corner and brings it alive in his novel about one of the neighborhood&amp;#039;s less honorable denizens. The Canadian publisher McClelland &amp;amp;amp; Stewart will reissue Richler&amp;#039;s best-known novel this fall. London: London: A Biography, by Peter Ackroyd. The author has made a name for himself as a writer about all things English, including biographies of William Blake and Shakespeare. Any visitor to London should consume this soup-to-nuts history before tackling this diverse and amazing city. San Francisco: A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, by Simon Winchester. Maybe we&amp;#039;re biased because one of us Babes lives atop the San Andreas Fault. But it&amp;#039;s hard to appreciate the City by the Bay without understanding the geological jerk that brought San Francisco to catastrophe a century ago. Winchester presents a masterful version, replete with the social and political implications of an event that charted San Francisco&amp;#039;s course into the modern era. New York: The Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York, edited by Jacquelin Cangro. The best way to people-watch in the Big Apple is on the subway. With these essays on the city&amp;#039;s underground by some of New York&amp;#039;s best writers, including Jonathan Lethem, Francine Prose and Colson Whitehead, you don&amp;#039;t even have to wait for the next train. Our favorite is from humorist Calvin Trillin, who describes a dilemma faced by his neighbors who love to kvetch about everything: &amp;quot;Our subway stop was being made beautiful, and we hadn&amp;#039;t figured out how to complain about it.&amp;quot; Paris: We&amp;#039;ll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, by John Baxter. A film critic, biographer and self-confessed book addict, Baxter offers a more risqu\u00E9 look at the City of Light (that&amp;#039;s Light, singular, as in Enlightenment) than you&amp;#039;ll find in most guidebooks. Weaving in his personal story \u2014 he came to live in the city because of a French woman named Marie Dominique (now his wife) \u2014 he offers witty and fascinating stories of the city&amp;#039;s erotic underbelly, past and present. Be forewarned: His language isn&amp;#039;t sanitized, and the book&amp;#039;s illustrations are daring. New Orleans: Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans, by Roy Blount Jr. Humorist Blount&amp;#039;s walk through New Orleans is part of Crown Journeys, a fabulous series pairing great authors with great cities. Writing his love letter to New Orleans before its destruction by Katrina, Blount is prescient and sad as he alludes to the possibility of a Great Deluge. Some of the spots he describes surely are gone now, but the spirit he captures in his rambles will make the city&amp;#039;s revival seem assured. Other interesting Crown Journeys, by the way, include Kinky Friedman on Austin (The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic) and Myla Goldberg on Prague (Time&amp;#039;s Magpie). Washington, DC: Katharine Graham&amp;#039;s Washington. This was Graham&amp;#039;s last gift to the city she ruled over as publisher of the Washington Post. Published posthumously, the 800-plus-page anthology includes a compilation of more than 100 articles and essays by the capital&amp;#039;s movers and shakers, from Will Rogers to Henry Kissinger, each introduced by the grand dame of Washington journalism. Chicago: The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow. In 2003, Bellow&amp;#039;s third novel \u2014 a first-person account by a boy living out the Depression on Chicago&amp;#039;s mean streets \u2014 celebrated its 50th anniversary. It&amp;#039;s now out in paperback with an introduction by political commentator Christopher Hitchens, who says the work wins the &amp;quot;Great American Novel&amp;quot; contest hands down. The novel, at the very least, captures the soul of the Windy City like no other piece of fiction. Boston: Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane. The heir apparent of crime noir king Raymond Chandler, Lehane offers the story of three young boys from the same Boston neighborhood who grow apart when one of them is molested, only to be later thrown together by crime and suspicion. Lehane recreates the sights and sounds of the working-class environs so well that the book&amp;#039;s setting becomes a fourth character in this novel, which is far more textured than its movie version starring Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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