Here are several new guides for travelers:
POCKET GUIDE
"10 Best: Atlanta" (Synergy Books, $9.95). Heavy on restaurant and club listings, with just enough on basic local attractions and side trips, this passport-sized guide is well suited to young professionals or business travelers with a little extra time to fill. Its 64 pages get right to the point, as you might expect from a series that got its start on the Web ( www.10best.com ). Entries such as the Brick Store Pub, Rolling Bones BBQ, Ritz-Carlton dining room, CNN studio tour and the nearby town of Athens, Ga., all get equal billing. The map that folds out of the back cover also is helpful.
BIOGRAPHICAL TRAVEL
"Walks Through Marie Antoinette's Paris" (Ravenhall Books, $27.95 hardcover). A life, anyone's life, is bound up in the place or places it is lived. The popular phrase is that geography is destiny. Take, for example, the life of Marie Antoinette. She became famous because she traveled from her native Austria to marry in France. And because court etiquette kept her at Versailles for so much of her life, she eventually created an idyllic getaway resort on its grounds. Would the French Revolution have taken place without her? Probably (though Thomas Jefferson didn't think so). But because she was there, in France, in Versailles, in salons flush with expensive furnishings, she gave the people someone to blame -- a foreigner -- and ultimately to punish for their misery.
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Author Diana Reed Haig has captured the poignancy of Marie Antoinette's life in what is a fast-paced and compassionate biography, written with the tastes and curiosities of today's traveler in mind. Along the way Haig weaves in wonderful stories about the palaces, rooms and grounds where the queen's life played out.
The text takes up with Marie Antoinette at the Chateau de Compiegne, where the 14-year-old Austrian girl first met the French royal family. It concludes at the spot where Madame Tussaud made a wax death mask of the decapitated queen.PILGRIMS' GUIDES
"American Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys and Spiritual Destinations" (Paraclete Press, $16.95). A sacred journey needn't necessarily be a religious one, at least not according to authors Mark Ogilbee and Jana Riess. They describe a pilgrim as a special sort of traveler who wants to change but who needs a "transition before transformation. When we become pilgrims," they write, "we become boundary-crossers, slipping out beyond our normal borders and limitations to other more spiritual realms." So a trip to Graceland in Memphis may be just as transcendent for Elvis fans as a visit to the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago is for the faithful who seek help for lost causes. You'll find both places described here along with nine other places in America that touch the spirit. From California missions to a Billy Graham crusade, here's proof that one needn't travel to the ends of the earth to find transformation.
"Every Pilgrim's Guide to Assisi and Other Franciscan Places" (Paraclete Press, $14.95). Ask someone who has been there, and they'll tell you it's tempting to start a tour of Assisi at the top of the city, at the Basilica of St. Francis. But author Judith Dean begs you not to. To understand the world of Francis is to approach Assisi as he would have, before his sainthood, before the basilica existed. Better to spend a half day getting your bearings, starting at the Chiesa Nuova. In deeply detailed text, Dean takes inventory of Assisi: what you'll see if you look left while walking up the aisle in the Chapel of St. Agnes, for instance, or that the effort to reach the Hermitage will reward you with sight of Francis' grotto if you "enter the buildings opposite the archway you've just come through, behind the well." Prayers are scattered throughout, and maps appear where they're needed. A modest number of color photos show what the places look like, but the hand-drawn sketches are a bit of a distraction.
