Lisa Alpine’s book Exotic Life: Laughing Rivers, Dancing Drums, and Tangled Hearts is a sprawling anthology of 19 travel tales. Alpine is an inspiration to women travelers everywhere. She fearlessly wanders through one obscure destination after the other, leaving her complete trust in the experience. She answers that timeless question - Can solo women travelers...

It's hard to believe the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand is in its 13th edition; having first graced the shelves of alternative bookstores and organic co-ops in 1982, a full month before the guidebook that started it all, Southeast Asia on a Shoestring (or the 'Yellow Bible'), hit the stands. Lonely Planet was a little...

Undress Me In The Temple of Heaven , by Susan Jane Gilman, reads almost like a mystery novel, except the mystery is why two naive teenagers who'd never been away from home before would decide to go to China in 1986. You kind of know the mystery right up front. But the rest of the...