Eyewitness Travel: Eastern & Central Europe by Dorling Kindersley Publishing, Inc.

If you are doing a multi-country trip in Eastern Europe, this is a good book to take with you. It contains all the most popular tourist attractions and describes them and their history in great detail. There are also pretty photos, maps, and drawings, which can help you when you're right there, trying to figure out what's what.

What DK doesn't do well is trip planning. They don't really dole out opinions on what's worth seeing and what's worth skipping, and they focus solely on the very popular tourist stuff. They also provide either basic factual or sugar-coated information on each place, so it's hard to tell if it's safe to travel to a certain country or if a country is easily accessible via public transportation or even how long it might take to travel around to some of these attractions.

I do like that they provide you with information on so much of the Eastern European region, broken out easily into countries and color coded. They're very thorough with organization of information.

Furthermore, the pictures and short history lessons make this a badass way to learn about countries torn apart by war and recreated several times. Who needs history textbooks when you have this bad boy?!

~6/10~