Description:
Any guidebook has its biases. It's the edge that makes a guidebook unique, the approach that lets you trust a guidebook implicitly (if those biases correspond with your own)--or that cause you grief, if you and the author don't see eye to eye. To his credit, Ian Keown is up-front with his propensities, spelling out his pet peeves in his introduction. Do you prefer ceiling fans to air-conditioning, dislike piped-in music intruding upon your candlelit dinner, and strive to avoid cruise-ship hordes? Keown does, and his recommendations are based on those values. Keown covers the Caribbean from the Cayman Islands on down to Tobago, imparting snippets of history and data (in the Caymans, for example, there are now 400 banks serving fewer than 20,000 people) and recommending the best, sweetest, most romantic places for a Caribbean holiday. Now in its ninth edition, Caribbean Hideaways has honed hotel description to a fine art. All the relevant information is there, plus humor, sarcasm, and praise. --Stephanie Gold
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