[.ca] Peru (ISBN 1585732966)

Great for Planning a Trip & Understanding the Culture:
If you want to travel to Peru, this is the guide that will bring you cultural information, history of the sacred sites, the people, villages, fiestas, as well as climate, major attractions, places to stay, and info on the coastal desert, highlands and jungle geography. Beautiful full color pictures bring Peru to life, and a thorough index will guide you to just about anything you would want to know about this amazing place. A great guide for planning, and learning!

Gorgeous!:
This is a beautiful, wonderfully illustrated book. I bought it, but didn't take it on my trip because friends were bringing along a copy. Even though we were on a tour, I found Danbury's "The Inca Trail: Cusco and Machu Picchu" a nice carry along. It's a good size and approaches Peru from a more "do-it-yourself" perspective. In contrast, I look at the Insight Guide every day at home and thrill to the pictures and production quality. It is worth every penny and will stay in my house to remind me of an amazing place to visit.

Good before and after trip, but not for taking with you:
Insight Guides do not spare cash and effort on good photographs (some may say that there are too many photographs, which makes the guide too thick, too heavy and unusable for a traveller). It is, however, more of a coffee-table book: try Frommer's, Rough Guide or Lonely Planet for practicalities. Insight Guide is not for carrying around (although maps are good). You will find a lot of good reading about history, culture and mentality (which Rough Guide or Lonely Planet, with their dull and uninspired writing, cannot hope to match). However, there is sometimes an impression of missing focus: Peru is a beautiful country that has some obvious highlights and it is wrong to pretend (as the guide seems to) that the whole country is equally interesting.