Not quite sure how one uses a book like this. I was thinking more or less along the lines of a checklist. Chicago Field Museum? Check. Petrified Forest? Done that. Grand Canyon? Mark that puppy off!

It's an obvious offshoot of the new 'things to do before you...' genre, which has many entries; I chose this one because we have a seven-year-old, so we have a good nine years to get through the list. However, unless you're independently wealthy, you can forget about finishing it. Great Wall of China? Uh, no. Iguazu Falls of Argentina? Um, not quite yet. Okavango Delta in Botswana? Er, maybe next year.

So it's quite a bit of a, 'Wouldn't it be cool if...' book for fantasizing; but certainly you can pick any spot on the globe and plan a vacation there, and pick up a few nearby spots from the book you can hit for the kids. I tend to do stuff on vacations rather than lying on a beach anyway, so we'd be quite likely to pick a week somewhere and hit everything the book lists nearby that we can.

With that usage in mind, I'm not thrilled that the book is primarily organized by topic rather than geographically. It may be nice that they have 25 animal-related sites, but I would much rather have been able to flip through everything in Peru all at once. There is a geographical index, but it's not that easy to use.

Still, with the explosion of this style of book, you could probably turn up a geographic-specific version for a specific vacation. Let's see...100 Science-Oriented Places To Visit In Ohio When Your Child Is Already In School But Not Yet Interested In Girls. Yeah. I'd buy a copy. ( )