BLUELIST Lonely Planet Publications Pp: 328 Price: Rs 900

It's every family's annual nightmare: deciding where to go for the holidays. The kids want to go to South Africa, because that's where their classmates spent their last vacation; the wife is pushing for Dubai because she has a sister there (shopping for gold is not the reason, she says vehemently), but you have your heart set on Hawaii. Lonely Planet's hot new Bluelist may not solve your travel problems, but it will certainly make reaching a consensus easier. The Bluelist is no ordinary listing of travel destinations. Rather, it's a list of travel recommendations ("618 things to do and places to go"), sliced and diced every which way. Lonely Planet publisher, Roz Hopkins, explains why they had to come up with a new verb (yep, like Google, Bluelist hopes to be a verb): "We created this because there is no word to describe what we set out to do with this new book, which is to 'create an evolving selection of classic and current travel experiences and destinations selected by Lonely Planet staff, authors and travellers'."

The result is an astonishing, intriguing and impressive travel directory. Where should you go if you wanted to see "most history per square mile"? The top three destinations, in the order mentioned, would be Rome (Italy), China, and Jerusalem (Israel). How about "The world's best booze and where to drink it?" That would be nihonshu, or sake, in Japan, followed by Guinness in Ireland, and beer in Belgium. And where would be you be better off if you wanted to simply streak? Onsen in Japan, Australia's Maslin Beach, or even Berlin's Tiergarten Park.

But the fun with Bluelist, to be updated every year, doesn't stop there. Lonely Planet's travel writers even tell you where you are likely to encounter the dodgiest scams. The locations range from Spain to China to, of course, India and the us, but no one can beat the Italians when it comes to conning. Here's the most popular Italian tourist scam as detailed by the Bluelist: "A woman holding a 'baby' trips; you lunge to catch the infant; your pockets are thoroughly picked by an accomplice as the 'mother' vanishes into thin air; and you realise you've been had when you stare into the baby's lifeless, artificial eyes".

Thanks to its enthusiastic editors and contributors, the book is packed with several other travel tidbits and, sometimes exasperating, trivia. For instance, did you know that, the Bluelist informs us, Slovakia sends around 600 kg of wrongly addressed mail back to Slovenia? That information is unlikely to prompt or discourage your trip to Slovakia. But if you ever did find yourself in that country, you'll almost certainly be reminded of its peculiar postal problem. Not to mention the Bluelist.

IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE THE ILLUSION OF DESTINY By Amartya Sen Allen Lane Pp: 215 Price: Rs 295

Amartya sen is justifiably respected around the world as an economist, academician, scholar and author. He has another identity: of a card holding liberal intellectual. His latest book, Identity and Violence, The Illusion of Destiny, is full of the angst he experiences in that last avatar. Sen argues that a distorted and uni-dimensional sense of identity is behind much of the violence that is wracking the world. Sectarian violence-in West Asia, Timor, Bosnia and Iraq-feeds on this perceived primary sense of identity, which subsumes all the others. He goes on to say religious or racial identities are not inherently more important than others based on profession, aptitude, ability or choice. Sen was an eye witness to the massacres and mayhem that accompanied India's partition, and so, brings a first person perspective to the issue.

The book also holds up a mirror to the fissures and fault lines that divide the world and directly challenges Samuel Huntington's clash of civilisations thesis. But its implied message that we must, as individuals, rise above these cultivated divisions and do the right thing is what makes it wooly-liberal in the end.