Switzerland Books

In many years of buying investment books, this was one of the few that gave me something I could really do, and that worked as it was supposed to.

It's rare to find a source of information that provides a historic and present-day world perspective.

Insurance and annuity contracts are not subject to Swiss withholding tax, unlike bank accounts and other Swiss fixed income instruments. Under certain conditions, they also enjoy tax deferred status for US residents and are exempt from US withholding taxes.

One very important benefit of using an annuity for strategic financial planning is tax related. An annuity permits tax deferrals on the investor's savings which translates into assets growing faster than would be the case if another investment vehicle were to be used. As stated earlier, annuities are used for a variety of financial planning objectives, but they are most often thought of in terms of retirement planning.

Save your money. Nothing these books tell you (which you can get off the net) will save you money--and the information will get you into trouble besides.

The real professionals don't need books. The rest of us need to invest our money wisely, and not send it to Adam Starchild.

PLEASE CANCEL THE ORDER. I HAVE NOT RECD THE PREVOIUS AND WOULD LIKE TO CANCEL THIS ONE AS I'M NOT SURE YOU WILL KEEP THE COMMITMENT. PLESAE REFUND.

and some other important details such as when you are supposed to take out your trash and the price of a freeway permit. Hate to say it but as a swiss I was offended by the bluntness, driven to tears by the caricatures and deeply frightened by the accuracy of this book. One star docked as it's a little Germanocentric.

We have just arrived in Switzerland four months ago and this book made getting here a lot less confusing and problematic than it could have been.

Even after our arrival in Vaud (one of the French speaking cantons) I have opened it over and over for advice and reminders about many little things that one needs clarification about (e.g., insurance, child care, driving, buying a car).

Although our experience has been somewhat different than described in the book (after all it is a different time and we are in a different region of the country) it is startling how true most of the book is. It is particularly good in terms of what to expect from institutions: government agencies, banking and insurance, the CFF/SBB. The internet links are also very useful and allow you to plan ahead for important parts of the move if you use them.

I would stongly recommend this book. You should not expect all of it to be 100% up-to-date, nor will it reflect your personal experience in every regard, but you will certainly have a much harder time without it.

As a final note, you may find Mr Hampshire's opinion of the Swiss to be harsh, and maybe it is, but perhaps is it better to be prepared for the worst and then have a pleasant surprise when you arrive.

This is a very useful book for anyone who is moving to Switzerland for the first time. I found in this publication many useful pieces of advice for the everyday living in Switzerland. Do not hesitate to buy this book if you plan to stay in Switzerland for a long time. Taxes, health insurance, renting a house, travelling, etc. are only a few examples of the subjects reviewed in this comprensive book. Sometimes the author employs a style that may be considered a bit irreverent, but I guess that he tried to write with a sense
of humour.
A good choice.
Marcelo Garcia

The author has made almost no effort to describe the French speaking parts of Switzerland. Too Germanocentric and at times a little irreverent. Otherwise, all the official information, transport, employment etc... is well researched and well written.

What the previous reviews of this remarkably enduring novel show is the difficulty readers encounter when they try to assign the book to a specific genre. While it has, as Dessaix makes such self-conscious reference to in the opening pages, elements of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, the novel itself is more than the experiences of a man undertaking the grand tour --literally throughout Europe and literally toward death, like Sterne himself. It is a work in which identity, the role and function of binary oppositions (the critical element that had so fascinated Dessaix in both A Mother's Disgrace and his two later works, And so forth and Corfu), the role of narrative in the construction and deconstruction of self and, of course, the meditation upon mortality. It is here that a second grand narrative is invoked because, like Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Dante's Divine Comedy essentially is the narrative structuring of the greatest binary opposition of all for the human mind: life and death, Heaven and Hell. Or, as it was once referred to, The Four Last Things, each of which forms a neat binary opposition that fits both Dessaix's elegiac mood and Dante's meditation upon free will: death, judgement, Heaven and Hell.

This is a novel that is as much masquerade as it is conveyor of metaphoric truth. It is a highly wrought and self-conscious work in which a character we come to discover is called Robert writes, apparently, letters to his lover in Australia as he journeys throughout Switzerland and Italy in search of the two elusive elements of the story: `equipoise' and `balance'. So, what is a novel, a work of fiction, filled with all the necessary fictional licences traditionally given to writers, becomes a fiction based on an apparent fact, with actual letters that have been judiciously edited for the reader; these letters then begin to constitute a diary, a diary in which impressions, longings, the search for peace dictate the structure of the meditations; this diary then transforms itself into a self-conscious literary meditation upon Dante, Patricia Highsmith, Turgenev, Sterne and the stories of Cassanova, Marco Polo and Antoinetta, the Baroness de St Léger. Problematically, for the reader at least, none of these stories is quite what they appear to be: Dante's is the tale of a `paranoid obsessive', Highsmith's `flatness' shows us not death but guilt, Turgenev shows us the night side of life, Sterne's travels are really expressions of longing and belonging, while the tales of Cassanova, Marco Polo and the Baroness (and even the Disappearing Courtesan) are not tales of derring-do or hopeless romanticism but the same yearnings for freedom that finally destroyed Monte Verità. In short, nothing is what it first seems to be. Even the fussy, overly pedantic and sometimes carping editor, Igor Miazmov (whose patronymic, incidentally, is the Russian word for a `miasma') is fictitious. The `R.' of the narrative is not Robert Dessaix but a fictional character, while the seemingly real editor is only real in so far as he is the fictional disguise of Dessaix himself.

In short, this is the nature of post-structuralist narrative: it takes the elements of traditional narrative genres, manipulates them, confuses them, blends them until the result is a hybrid fiction that is as elusive as the flash of gold seen in a Japanese pool as the carp swims away from you. The author has become the self-conscious subject of his own fiction, as well as being its own critic; in short, this is the fiction of writer as subject while simultaneously being writer as author. This, then, allows Dessaix to explore one of the other powerful metaphors in his work, the journey; certainly, the journey is among the most ancient of literary metaphors, having been explored at length in The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd as well in The Divine Comedy, among others. But Dessaix's question is more subtle than simply asking, What happens when one's journey ends? Here, the question becomes, What journey does one take when the meaning assigned to one's life is so radically altered, so fundamentally transformed `so that even when you're drinking in the abundant beauty, you feel a pang not unlike grief' and the shadow of loss, grief, `illness as the night-side of life' comes to dominate one's every awareness? It is the answer to this provocative question, this demand that the writer (and, by the way, the reader) confront his mortality and fashion from it a self-awareness and capacity to craft his own journey as a metaphor of life, that creates this sometimes illusory narrative, Night Letters.

The title itself is provocative in its suggestions. Literary history is rich with references to the night and, usually, such references connote danger, threat or death. For centuries the canticle recited in the Third Nocturn of the Office of the Dead has come from Isaiah 38: 10: Ego dixi: In dimidio dierum meorum vadam ad portas inferi frustratus residuo annorum meorum. It is a sombre meditation on the end of life, the place of death and our need to resign ourselves to life's inevitable close: `I said, in the noontide of my days, I must go to the gates of Sheol: I am deprived of the residue of my years'. It is a reminder that darkness is inseparable in the consciousness of man from the reality of death, the closure of life and the loss of light. So, in choosing the title Night Letters, Dessaix explicitly invokes in our minds this meditation upon death but with a significant shift in emphasis: these are letters, they are the intimate communication between human beings and while they are meditations upon the inevitable end we all face and, in R's case, one that conjures up dreams of `banging around in a forest of hanged corpses', they are a creative response to the options that remain open to us before we reach the `noontide of [our] days'. In this respect, their creativity is an affirmation of life, a literary statement that `in the midst of life we are in death' but that, in typically post-structuralist fashion, life remains, unyielding and beckoning. Thus the idea of darkness moves from being a threat to becoming an opportunity for meditation, a means of discovering the balance between Professor Eschenbaum's intellectualised sexual brutality, the Baroness's `circle of desire and disappointment', Patricia Highsmith's `mellow disconnectedness' and Dante's Mount of Purgatory, for ever facing Heaven but for ever forbidden its blessed promise. Through these meditations on life, art, literature, fornication and geographical serendipities such as the Herb Garden on the Isola Grande, or the St Gotthard Pass and the Italian border, where `civilisation seems tempered by Eros and Eros in turn is tautened and braced by contact with the Northern enemy', we are led, finally, `to be part of that exultation' that brings the novel to its conclusion. Simply, life must continue, no matter the uncertainties, the failings, the pains, the weaknesses, the fallibilities that threaten to destroy us. This understanding, only this understanding, is the fruit of nocturnal meditation and communicated only through `night' letters that allow the still, inner voice to speak. With yet another layer of irony, R's writing at night is also a means of protecting himself against the `solitude'--or is it the `isolation and loneliness'?--of the coming night, thereby linking R, Miazmov and Dessaix by the thread of mortality and our shared fear of the dark where, still we fear that `any passing phantom can sink its teeth into your throat' (p.31).

Another significant feature of this novel is its literary use of narrative disjunction, a disjunction that is both temporal, literary as well as weaving together the linear narrative with a non-linear, emotively structured narrative. While the letters are chronologically sequential and move us from one day to the next over the course of twenty `nights', or letters, they evoke the literary ghost of Scherherazade, who tells tales to King Sharyar over 1001 nights in order to avoid execution. In this sense, the letters are something of a literary postponement of death, a literary entertainment designed to forestall the break of morning and the execution it must bring with it. Yet while this chronological narrative layer is, in itself, an inescapable element of the novel, it is in some ways its least important feature. Importantly, R's meandering journeys to the St Gotthard Pass, to the Isola Grande, to Venice, his train journeys through the darkness and the zig-zagging that evokes both A Sentimental Journey and Sterne's other picaresque novel, the eccentric Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, defy such narrative logic. They are, instead, operating with a logic that is intuitive, one that brings R to his most important realisation in the novel: `It's not the number of things, surely, but the quality. It's the subtlety of your vision that casts a spell on time, not the number of things you see. That's the direction the needle on my compass points to' (p.197). This, then, as Dessaix's metaphor of the compass evokes, is about direction. Not linear direction, not compass direction in its true sense, but the direction taken by the soul, by our sense of longing, which gives us `the subtlety of...vision that casts a spell on time'. This is the real lesson, the one R has been moving toward through the tales of Marco Polo, Cassanova, the tragic figure of the Baroness and the Disappearing Courtesan. Each tale draws us a little back, or a little forward in time; each tale becomes `a spell on time' that allows R to understand `the direction the needle on my compass points to'. This journey leads R to St Anthony of Padua in the Padua letters where, significantly, he weeps from `disenchantment' as his erratic search leads him to a saint who is reduced to `finding lost pen-knives and golf-balls' from being the Hammer of Heretics and it `all smacks of something I deeply dislike' (p. 234). Our constant focus on Italy, the erratic nature of the journeys themselves is about reaching that understanding of the `direction the needle on my compass points to' in its subjective, non-linear way. As R tells us while in Padua, `These days I try hard to make things worthwhile for what they are now, without considering what they may lead to or whether what I've been experiencing can be recaptured'(p.240). It is after this point of disaffection with St Anthony of Padua, with his violent contradictions, that R reaches a second key narrative and metaphoric point in the story's narrative, which is an understanding of the ways of travelling that Cassanova, Marco Polo and Sterne represent. They are not mutually exclusive ways of seeing the world but ones upon which R may draw as and when he needs, or chooses, to do so: it is suffused with eroticism, as R sees Sterne's to have been, with its Enlightenment (and very modern, if we consider what leads R to Italy in the first place) dangers and temptations, Cassanova's sensual bid for freedom through immersion in each moment, or Polo's prosaic journeys for mercantile profit. Like Cassanova, R pursues a narrative and emotional journey that may lead him to `a secret knowledge...which would reveal quite a different meaning behind everyday functions and events' (p. 249).

This leads us back to the opening paragraph of the story, with it surprising and gaudy Freudian image:
Streaking through the jungle on a gaudy leopard, cape billowing out behind me as if I were aflame, I have on my head (my greying pate) - and this is vital - a hat, a black, gargantuan fedora with a drooping brim, and streaming from one side of it is a cassowary feather (of all things). A flash of red and blue - and I am gone! Should I explain? Perhaps I should, because of all the things I want to tell you, why I'm now astride a leopard is, to me at least, the most important (p. 3).
It is an extraordinary and contradictory image: the leopard is described as `gaudy' while it is the rider himself who has his `cape billowing out behind me...a...gargantuan fedora...and...a cassowary feather...'. This reversal of apparent meaning points the reader towards the narrative complexities discussed earlier, while articulating the emotional sense by which R orders his world as he begins and, later, continues his journey. It is also important to note the change in symbolic meaning of this image at the conclusion of the novel. Initially, the leopard captures the idea of headlong, uncontrolled flight, with the rider's vitality streaming out of him in the form of the billowing red cape and the `gargantuan fedora' masks his identity and is dominated by the ghostly blue of the cassowary feather. It is a striking image of flight, of a loss of control as the leopard impels the character onward without any sense of this ridiculous figure exercising any control. It is, in this respect, a symbolic dream image of R's life with his newly diagnosed terminal illness. As we read R's letters, we follow his journey on the leopard's back and come to realise that R's erratic journey is as much the leopard's--his instinctual drive, as it were--as it is any imitation of Sterne's eccentric peregrinations. By the conclusion of the novel, the fear embodied in the leopard and which carries R is recalled as being `a lion or a leopard padding along behind me, tensed to pounce', with R having only two choices available to him: `bravely facing the lion (and letting it tear me to pieces) and keeping on running'. What we encounter in the opening of the novel is not, in fact, the beginning of the dream at all but its conclusion: `I neither faced the lion nor kept on running--I leapt onto its back, stuck a hat on my head and rode off on it...with my heart in my mouth, but also with true exultation' (pp. 271-272). The image that opens the novel is the conclusion of the dream, a celebration of choice, of control, rather than its opposite. Again, Dessaix disjoins the narrative sequence of R's dream to generate a level of surrealist symbolism that is multivalent as well as seemingly contradictory. As with art, the meaning of life may alter from moment to moment, depending on the view we take of what we are looking at and the care with which we explore it. Thus, the moment of fear and loss of control is transformed magically into one of celebration, which retains a full awareness of the dangers and risks inherent in this new direction. It is a celebration of vitality in its purest sense, of living from moment to moment; it is the surrealist rendering of what R tells his correspondent toward the end of the story: `These days I try hard to make things worthwhile for what they are now, without considering what they may lead to or whether what I've been experiencing can be recaptured' (p.240). The dream is the celebration of this more cerebral articulation of the need to live in each moment fully but without the need to `seize' and control each aspect of personal experience. It is the personal balance R has sought, the `voiding of the self, the submission to The Way, both Being and Doing quite out of your hands' (p. 15) referred to following the annunciation of his `Chinese Gabriel'.

Of course, the `annunciation' that commences this search for freedom, for personal meaning, is significant both for its use as the narrative frame of the novel and for the pseudo-religious symbolism employed to explore R's most traumatic personal moment. For the Virgin Mary, the moment of the Annunciation, the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel to tell her that she shall bear the Messiah in her womb (qv. Luke 1:26-38), is one of momentous change and confusion. In the same vein, the doctor who delivers to R the news of his illness is a harbinger of `great import', whose message will for ever change of the course of the recipient's life--altering its shape, purpose and meaning--just as the Archangel Gabriel's did for the Virgin Mary. R's description of the doctor as his `Chinese Gabriel' is more than simply a literary metaphor; it goes right to the heart of the novel's exploration of ways of seeing the world, of the `subtlety of...vision' that enables us to cast `a spell on time' and, like Cassanova, or the romanticised version of Marco Polo, to discover `a secret knowledge...which would reveal quite a different meaning behind everyday functions and events'. It is significant that R turns immediately to art to offer meaning to the news delivered to him by his `Gabriel'. It offers a way of mediating experience, of offering a mirror to life and the sometimes uncontrollable events its sweeps us up in. This, too, goes to the heart of Dessaix's quasi-fictional meditation upon existence. In the persona of the `Chinese Gabriel', the doctor no longer simply delivers the news of a terminal illness but news of a different way in which the world must be viewed, of a new understanding of self that must be attained; like the Virgin Mary's, this journey is not without its rigours, or even its dangers and it may, like Mary's, only end at the foot of the cross, but the journey itself will have profoundly altered the traveller's understanding of life and the nature and purpose of existence. The iconic paintings of the Annunciation invoked by R, Fra Angelico's in particular, evoke the colour, the mystery, the moment of balance in which the divine meets the human. Of course, R is not beyond making a rather ironic and self-deprecating literary joke of this when he juxtaposes the Virgin's statement quoniam virum non cognosco--`Because I know not a man'--with his own real confession of his `sins' of the flesh. What this moment of realization does show us is that R, as a character, carries a deep awareness of himself that prevents him from seeking a shallow solace in sorrow, or self-pity. There is a robust awareness, like the Virgin's, that means he, too, must accept his fate and say to his `Gabriel' fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum--`Be it done to me according to thy word'.

What each of these images invokes is a particular moment of seeing, a way of receiving such momentous news ranging from Ghirlandaio's nervous Virgin who appears to push away the angel, to Fra Angelico's meekly submissive `handmaiden of the Lord', to van Eyck's regally clad Virgin who receives the angel's greeting in pious dismay, to da Vinci's piously learned Virgin, who receives the news from the hands of the angel and who, it seems, confirms her role in the divine plan. Each portrayal offers R a lens through which he may view his own experience and a way of mediating his response to that news. From the outset, it becomes clear, art is positioned as the means of developing the `subtlety of...vision' required to understand life in all of its moments, from the tragic, as the opening of the story shows us, to the ridiculous, as we see with Professor Eschenbaum's mugging and, then, to the fleeting moments of the sublime on the Isola Grande, or `the illuminating experience in St Anthony's Basilica' in Padua, which is as much a mundane revelation as it is spiritual.

It all moves R to the point where he can finally write `I've quite decided to move on', not merely in a physical sense but in a psychological and emotional way as well as he picks up on the `little signals' that tell him the world awaits his return. In this sense, this is a story about the journey out as much as it is about the journey that leads to return; it is about the importance of the `green world' to the process of bringing order and meaning to our lives and the way in which art may most readily supply that `green world' for us to inhabit until we are ready to return.

A novel about a journey that begins when the narrator discovers his HIV status. Thereafter, he journeys into the legends and narrations of Venice and Padua, suffucing the landscape with myth, legend, stories and passion. But in all that, he leaves out any exploration of his own sexual urges and promptings (erlaier referred to as 'adventures he wouldn't have been without'. His identity is purely that of journey-man. It is as if being HIV pos. ends sexuality and draws it into a dark room of past memories only, leaving the present/future blank. This isn't a gay novel, but the narrator is gay in a wholly vacant way. The perfum eof the stories suffocates the individuality of the author, and it is the author/narrator that is the shared point between reader and the contextas of the journey.

I discovered "Night Letters" at a booksale in a local public library. I hadn't heard of it at all. What struck me, and got me to pick it up to examine it, was the shere beauty of the bound book and its cover. The beauty of the language kept me enthralled. The literary allusions, including references to Patricia Highsmith and her novel recently made into the film "The Talented Mr. Ripley", caught my attention since I had recently seen the film with its lush, gorgeous Venetian scenery. Fascinating also were the descriptions of the Italian and Swiss Alps--making the journey not only introspective, but also great travel,arm-chair style. I recommend it to anyone who seeks excellence in writing.

Bruno bettelheim tells of an Indian tradition in which the sick go to a story teller who examines the patient and then recites a story designed to work a cure. It's a challenging thought but it is obvious that some stories have the power to heal. This is a book about powerful stories, powerful places and the healing they bring.

The framework of this picareque novel is familiar enough: the writer flees from his homeland under sentence of death. [He has the AIDS virus.] He goes to Switzerland and Italy in denial and there follows a path rich in stories and allusions. If you don't know your Dante and your Thomas Mann you will miss some of the richness but even the most general reader will connect with the narrative jewells the writer encounters. There are obvious connections with the "Death in Venice" motif: same place, different plague. Other stories are spun out of the place or the people he meets. Finally, sated and strengthened, he turns home empowered and prepared to face death.

This is an Australian novel despite its European setting. Non Australian readers will be charmed by the wit and the sensitivity to the sound of narrator's voice. [It is a very aural novel.] If Robert Dessaix can write more novels like Night Letters he may become our premier writer for the next century.

Robert Dessaix's Night Letters is a poetic masterpiece. Not since Edmund White's richly evocative Nocturnes For the King of Naples has a gay novelist infused the themes of love and death with so fine a lyric sensibility.

On finding himself diagnosed HIV positive, the book's Australian protagonist sets off on a journey from Switzerland across Northern Italy to Venice. Finding in Venice the funereal counterpoint to his own meditations on mortality, he writes a series of letters home to a friend. It is within the inspired context of these letters that the novel develops its hypnotic narrative qualities.

If Night Letters is essentially composed of one man's nocturnal reflections on the nature of time, history and the search for an earthly paradise, then the nature of that exercise is dramatically underscored by other enriching narratives. When the protagonist makes the acquaintance at his hotel of the closeted Professor Eschenbaum, then we are introduced to the story of The Disappearing Courtesan. It is through the Professor that we learn the historic intrigue of Donna Scamozzi to have her virgin daughter Camilla married to a wealthy Venetian. Camilla's scheming liaisons lead eventually to a breathtakingly-paced tale of sordid sex and revenge. Gangbanged at the instigation of Lorenzo Cordellini for her infidelities, Camilla falls in love with his red-headed, blue-eyed son Alberto. Through the machinations of a magician Camilla contrives to bring father and son into murderous conflict. Lorenzo mistakenly knifes his son, who is in drag, and as a consequence of her grief for Alberto, Camilla is never seen or heard of again. She has dematerialized.

Much of the novel's beauty comes from the author's profound reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy, and his linking the protagonist's experiential journey to that of Dante's passage from the Inferno to the Paradiso. Dante's perception of God as a radiant point in the universe, proves a pivot on which the troubled Australian can endeavour to find rest. 'The idea of Point,' he writes, 'and the relationship between a point and straight lines and circles, is one I must contemplate more, instead of thinking constantly about lunch, train timetables and the havoc in my veins.'

Nocturnal dialogue between our protagonist and the erudite Professor Eschenbaum, leads to the additional consideration of time as it is observed in the lives of two famous Venetians: Marco Polo and Casanova. Siding with Casanova on account of his intense magnification of the moment, something to be vitally lived by those diagnosed positive, the narrator tells us: 'Polo discovered paradise over there, you see, he travelled there and then came back. Casanova discovered paradise in the travelling, if you see what I mean - it wasn't somewhere you could come back from.'

Far from being morbid, Night Letters offers a message of hope. It is by living now and in the immediate that life is most purposefully experienced. The narrator who is constantly alert to celebrating the beauty and colours of the Italian landscape is not a person evaluating his life in retrospect, but rather someone intent on engaging with the present and biting it in the way we would a ripe peach or plum.

The outcome is heroic. Dessaix has written a novel in which poetic and philosophic reflection are compounded into brilliant narrative. Illness is viewed as contingent on the will to live, and the future as it is apprehended by the narrator is open-ended and continuous.

Jeremy Reed

I've always liked the Eyewitness Travel Guides for their great photos, maps, narrative and tidbits. This one lives up to the series' standard. And these books make a great keepsake after your trip.

We had one week in Geneva and this guide pretty much explained everything there was to see. Well written, easy to use, very well organized, it was possible to get a handle on any large Swiss city in about 30 minutes.

I had purchased a similar book for my son about France to help him with his French language courses in high school. I ended up spending more time with it than he did, and when I saw the other country titles, I decided to purchase a few more. The Switzerland book is excellent in that it condenses a lot of information into a very portable volume. The photos and illustrations are fabulous and the background historical and cultural information is superb. The listing of accomodations and restaurants also appears to be very well researched and provides a starting point for further Internet research. My favorite part of Switzerland is the Bernese Oberland, and this book provides a genuine sense of what it is really like. I can definitely benefit from this book on future travel to Switzerland. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know more about the country, as well as for experienced travellers. Well done to the authors, editors, and publisher!

I'm not a seasoned or jaded traveler ... yet! So a comprehensive travel guide is critical to my preparation for a trip and a great way of post-filling information and details into some of the holes or places that I might have missed or had to rush through when I was actually on the trip. Along with photographs and trip journals, they're also a wonderful way to resurrect detailed memories of a trip long after you've returned home.

Eyewitness Travel Guides seem to have the market beat by a long margin! That's not to say that Lonely Planet, Frommer, Michelin or the Blue and Green Guides miss the mark entirely but the Eyewitness series, in general, seems to be more informative. The photographs and illustrations instill a higher degree of keen anticipation and provide a better means of choosing in advance between a world of competing destinations and alternative tourist attractions.

Their guide to Switzerland, in particular, was astonishingly accurate and complete - history, food, travel, hotels, geography, destinations, estimated costs, highlights, outdoor activities - every last one of them spot on and accurately described from the perspective of an actual trip through St Moritz, Lucerne, the Bernina Pass to Tirano, Italy and Interlaken. Even now the photographs of Swiss cuisine and cheese can set my mouth to watering!

One noteworthy omission that my traveling companion and I discovered by accident - Switzerland offers a museum pass for 30 Swiss francs that will give admission for one month to virtually every museum in the country. That's a remarkable offer given that the countryside is positively littered with a host of attractive museums, castles and attractions most of which charge a 5 to 10 franc admission. We learned that little tidbit from the concierge of the Palace Lucerne Hotel - kudos to the hotel for over the top service and a great piece of advice!

With that one small suggestion for addition to future editions, the Eyewitness Travel Guide to Switzerland easily earns a five-star review. And Switzerland, by the bye, is certainly a delicious five-star travel destination!

Paul Weiss

Pros: this guidebook has lots of pictures and gives lots of information region by region, detailed cut-outs of major historical buildings. I also found the pictures in the survival guide section useful, where they describe the various Swiss dishes and food/drink products.

Cons: no information on how to get to different places by train (e.g. from Interlaken to Schilthorn or Jungfraujoch). I understand the guide cannot list train numbers and times, but at least it could have described how to, for example, get from Luzern to Mt. Titlis by train. Train travel is a big part of the Switzerland experience so this seems like a big omission. There's also not much information on hiking, even though this is a very popular country with hikers. An overview map of hiking trails would have been useful. However, there are other guides that cover hiking so this is a minor omission by comparison.

This book describes inns that you do not find on line or in the usual search engines. We stayed at two of them in Sept 2008 and felt very happy to have "discovered" both.

As of June 2006, this was the only book I could find with the information I needed to plan a trip through the Bernese Oberland section of the Swiss Alps. Even the internet proved less helpful than this cohesive, complete guide to hikes and accommodations in a fairly remote area. The book helped me plan a wonderful, memorable trip. My only wish is that the maps were drawn to scale.

Ms. Lieberman is an expert on Euro hiking, and her books are always extremely helpful in trip planning and execution. This title is no exception. She has identified some of the best inns, and I used her recommendations with great results on a recent trip.

I'm a compulsive trip planner, and our recent trip to the Alps sent me into trip-planning overdrive. This book was my favorite resource for finding out-of-the-way lodging in the mountains of Switzerland. From the descriptions of the Hotels themselves, to the guides to Switzerland's various regions, to the suggested hiking trails, we found Marcia Lieberman's advice to be impeccable.

Our favorite was the Hotel Waldrand Pochtenalp, a place so far from the beaten path that we never would have found it without the help of this excellent guide!

This book introduced us to a new way of experiencing Switzerland, the Alps, and the great outdoors. Staying at a Berghotel is truly civilized hiking! Spectacular views, challenging hikes, and an evening ended with a cold beer overlooking the terrain you have just climbed. The hikes, hotels, accomodations are all clearly described. The food, at the hotel we stayed was excellent, family style. We're returning this year for a longer hike to a series of huts/hotels. Highly recommend this book for planning a trip to the Swiss Alps.

Ropke was a major influence in the economic reconstruction of post-World War II Germany. This work is an excellent reintroduction to Ropke for a generation that needs to hear his message. If you are seeking to learn about sound economic alternatives to the irresponsible economic policies promulgated by both major U.S. political parties this is a good book to start with. Zmirak sets forth Ropke's economic and social philosophy in the context of the turbulent times through which he lived and worked. Highly recommended for the general reader.

A window on the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century, seen through the eyes of Wilhelm Röpke, outstanding economist and social thinker. A tale skillfully retold by a scholar of our times in this very readable account of Röpke's life and work. A pleasure for anyone interested in the economic history of the twentieth century. Röpke's insights into the Great Depression, the errors of National Socialism and, after World War II, attempts at reconstruction and reform have the ring of truth and are of relevance to our times.

Wilhelm Röpke is a brilliant German-born economic, social and political theorist, and perhaps my favorite amongst the "Austrian school." He stands apart from his colleagues in that he thinks on a more humane level rejecting crude utilitarian calculations in favor of sound empirical reasoning. The crux of Röpke's economic thought is that the individual counts. This brilliant German economist of the "Austrian school" stood up to the centralizing and dehumanizing policies of the Nazis. Collectivist ideologies lay waste to civil society-destroying the intermediary institutions between individual and state-supplanting them with institutions to empower and enhance the state. Röpke recognized that allocating resources by the fair play of supply and demand is the most humane system and he was champion of the market economy. He was influential over economist Ludwig Erhard, who architected FRG's postwar economic plan, which emphasized free enterprise.

Röpke possessed some peculiarities in his lexicon that set in him apart from his colleagues, but his motive for such peculiarities was principled. Röpke rejected characterizing socialism as a "planned economy" since in his view a market economy is just an economy "planned" by entrepreneurs as opposed to state planners. He preferred the delineation of "market economy" to "capitalism," since what often passed for capitalism in the early twentieth century was a large interventionist welfare state in a cozy lockstep relationship with big business monopolists. This was state corporatism not capitalism. Moreover, "capitalism" was, of course, coined by its chief critic Karl Marx and while the term captures the importance of capital to the market economy, it remains rather sterile. Capitalism frequently connotes a materialistic consumerist ideology or images of big business rather than a social framework based on the market economy. Röpke would attest that mammon is not the measure of all things. In Röpke's eyes, the intangibles-that is to say faith, family and tradition-are the things that animate life and give it meaning.

Röpke recognizes the limitations of the market economy. Röpke possesses a remarkable sense of prudence and conservative sobriety in his thinking as it relates to the political economy. He rejected the idea of making economists into social engineers whether in the interests of "efficiency" or "social justice." And amongst his "Austrian" colleagues like F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, he brought economics to a more humane level, rejecting crude utilitarian logic in favor of more humane empirical reasoning to defend the market economy. Furthermore, he refrains from the market idolatry that is so common to libertarian apologists for the free-market these days. Libertarians frequently espouse an ideology that can be summed up as "everything in the market, nothing outside the market." (This, of course, turns Mussolini's mantra on its nose.) Röpke recognizes something that libertarians miss with their penchant for crude utilitarian calculations and their moral neutrality that often makes being an avowed "libertarian" indistinguishable from being a "libertine." Many libertarians content themselves writing diatribes defending the "robber barrons" of the yesteryears while praising the colossal (e.g. Wal-Mart.) In their efforts to defend any and everything related to "the private sector," they forget that the apparently sporadic interventions of the state often come at the behest of big business. Many big business capitalists content themselves with cozy public-private partnerships that translate to steady, predictable profits and a regulated environment that drowns small business competition. Big business possess a comparative advantage in that they can absorb the regulatory costs easier than their smaller competitors and perhaps influence the regulations. Röpke, however, scorns the colossal not in demagogic rhetoric, but in the rhetoric of an economist. He likewise sees "big business" as a concomitant pillar of "big government" and its regulatory state.

Underlying Röpke's humane economy is the idea that a market economy needs a prudent civil framework, widespread distribution of property, a strong entrepreneurial middle class and emphasis on parochial traditionalism. Anyway, Röpke itinerates the need for sound monetary and fiscal policy on the part of the state. He holds that the gold standard is the only real safeguard against the vicious boom-and-bust cycles of modern capitalist society. Röpke recognized that a market economy flourishes when tradition and community guard against the centralizing depredations of the state and big business. Röpke further emphasized the principle of subsidiarity, which in Europe today seems to survive only in that beautiful alpine island of parochialism-Switzerland-which itself is straddled by the colossal and cosmopolitan EU super-state as if it is ready to be consumed.

In the Humane Economy, Röpke surmised that: "The market economy, and with social and political freedom, can thrive only as part and under the protection of a bourgeois system. This implies the existence of a society in which certain fundamentals are respected and color the whole network of social relationships: individual effort and responsibility, absolute norms and values, independence based on ownership, prudence and daring, calculating and saving, responsibility for planning one's own life, proper coherence with the community, family feeling, a sense of tradition and the succession of generations combined with an open-minded view of the present and the future, proper tension between individual and community, firm moral discipline, respect for the value of money, the courage to grapple on one's own with life and its uncertainties, a sense of the natural order of things, and a firm scale of values." To answer those who might sneer at this, Röpke nimbly replies, "Whoever turns his nose up at these things... suspects them of being 'reactionary'... may in all seriousness be asked what ideals he intends to defend against Communism without having to borrow from it."

John Zmirak does a wonderful job profiling the life and work of a very brilliant man. Bravo! Röpke's ideas are remarkably original, but even so are analogous to that of conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, Anglo-Catholic distributists like Chesterton and Belloc, and the Southern agrarians like Agar and Tate. You might check out their works as well, if Röpke interests you.

Wilhelm Röpke was really a great personality and an important figure in the history of liberal thinking. It was certainly worthwhile to publish a book on him and Zmirak has done a great job. He shows, that Röpke was not only an economist, but also a profound social philosopher. This reconciliation of technocratic economies and human values would be even more needed nowadays than at the time of Röpke. Zmirak shows better than other books on Röpke, that the Swiss social and political system was very important for Röpke's thinking, that many ideas were new only to Germans or Americans, but draw on Swiss history and Swiss experience.
-, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

The author has done an excellent job in pinpointing to what extent Wilhelm Röpke, in his most mature work, was fired by his first-hand knowledge and experience of the small-scale, directly democratic, and partially corporatistic and communitarian institutions of his Swiss environment. Röpke's twin emphasis, on the one hand on private property rights, individual liberty and self-reliance, and on the other on a social setup characterized by face-to-face networks can be regarded as an antidote against the incipient facelessness of both an atomized capitalistic mass society and a bureaucratic welfare state. -Robert Nef,

The author, a historian, discusses the role of Switzerland during World War II as a safe haven for Allied bombers which were hit during air raids in Germany. Instead of trying to make it back to England or Italy, the pilots attempted to fly to Switzerland where they were treated much better than if they had fallen into enemy hands. The vast majority of the Swiss were in favor of the allies. Switzerland was the only predominantly German speaking country which did not want to be annexed by Hitler. The author describes the various defenses that the Swiss put up which would have made it very difficult to conquer for the Nazis to just come in and take over the country. Switzerland's fierce independence, and the natural defense of the Alps provided a strong deterrent to the Nazi regine.
166 United States bombers landed in Switzerland after getting hit by German AA or fighter planes. The United States bomber squadrons in Europe suffered the highest rate of casualties during World War II.

The author traces the history of Switzerland's role during World War II and the fate of these crews who landed in Swiss territory. Not a well known story to most Americans.
Highly recommended for those with an interest in the European theatre of World War II.

Tom Kirsch

With a world war blazing around all your borders, it is not so easy to maintain your neutrality. Switzerland, a tiny republic encircled by fascist tyrannies, managed just that difficult feat during World War 2. Three circumstances worked in its favor in achieving this policy. Switzerland had:

(1) an armed and trained populace (2) an almost impenetrable terrain in its Alpine fortress (which covers most of the country) and (3) a strong and tested tradition of honest, and heavily armed, neutrality stretching back to the Middle Ages.

Switzerland's good fortune was also good luck for others, including 1700 American airmen, who, during the course of the war, found safe haven in Switzerland when their ships were crippled in combat and some 100,000 internees and escaped POWs from many armies, as well as about 200,000 civilian refugees.

Well-armed and neutral, Switzerland still had to defend its sovereignty and people not just from the Nazis, but on occasion, from stray American bombers, as well, as Stephen Tanner documents in "Refuge from the Reich," his exciting account of this chapter of the air war over Europe and American airmen's seeking sanctuary in tiny Switzerland.

Ground armies and air armadas swirled along the Swiss borders from June 1940 to May 1945. From time to time, soldiers crossed Switzerland's borders, by land and by air, to find themselves interned "for the duration." In all, over 100,000 soldiers and airmen were interned in Switzerland during the war, including approximately 1700 American aviators, mostly the crews of heavily damaged B-17 and B-24 bombers that could not make it back to their bases in England or Italy.

The first American airmen began arriving in Switzerland in August 1943, as 8th and 15th Air Force began their heavy daylight bombing campaigns over southern Germany. In 1944, as many as ten crippled aircraft might land there in a given day. Stephen Tanner tells the story of the fortunate airmen who made it safely down to Swiss soil -- and also tells the sadder tale of their crewmates who died in crashes or who fell short and ended up in German stalags.

Mr. Tanner has written a compelling narrative history, briefly tracking the evolution of the democratic Swiss Confederation from its origins in the heart of medieval, monarchist Europe, and also describing the development of strategic air power and its application in Europe during World War 2. He gives a running account that weaves the stories of the American aviators and the little democracy's tenacious defense of its independence and scrupulous adherence to the Geneva Conventions. Tanner combines a "top down" strategic overview with "bottom up" personal narratives of the surviving aviators very successfully.

"Refuge from the Reich" is also a very moving book . You will find the stories of the US airmen buried in the cemetery in the Swiss town of Munsingen. You will find accounts of airmen wanting back in the fight and mounting hundreds of successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) escapes, often with the help of US embassy personnel and ordinary Swiss citizens. You will find, too, tales of the infamous little camp at Wauwilermoos, under the command of the corrupt Nazi sympathizer, Captain Beguin, where discipline cases and unsuccessful escapees alike were sometimes sent for punishment. You will find accounts of the U.S. Army Air Force's bombing of Swiss towns and cities in error -- of the bombing of Schaffhausen with 50 dead, and even of Zurich and Basel with less tragic results. Mostly you will find the humanity of the Swiss people and the young American airmen on display, as they encounter each other in the midst of world war.

"Refuge from the Reich" does a very nice job of combining strategy and diplomacy with dangerous missions, hazardous landings, escapes and captures, a little espionage and intrigue, and a most illuminating portrait of a neutral people surviving in the shadow of world war.

Although Mr Tanner's previous books about military history were not so impressive in terms of accuracy or comprehensiveness, this one is a real gem and is the best account of Switzerland as a refuge for US fliers during World War II. The first chapters cover a short history of Switzerland as well as the origins of the aerial war in Europe and then follows the main story with a wealth of first hand accounts. Bravery, luck and terror are interwooved in these stories of the old warriors and there are also many facts about the general picture of the internment in Switzerland. Probably the most enjoyable part of the book was that about the conditions of life that the US fliers experienced at Adelboden, Wengen and Davos and the many attempts they made to escape from there in order to rejoin their units. Very well researched and written book!

Stephen Tanner's Refuge From The Reich is a compelling and informative account of the treatment of civilian and military refugees, escapees, and evadees at the hands of the Swiss under the military authority of General Henri Guisan during the Second World War. Interned at ski resorts for the duration of the war, the U.S. officers and men were afforded the same sparse allowances, poorly heated accommodations, spartan living conditions, and subsistence diets of 1,500 calories per day that characterized the lives of Swiss burghers, who were then as dependent on Germany for foodstuffs and coal as their current descendants are for tourism, and whose antipathy to Germans remains a part of the Swiss national character today. The airmen's boredom and eagerness to return to the fray are convincingly depicted, as are their often successful attempts to escape and the deplorable, substandard conditions at the prisons (principally at Wauwilermoos, the swamp of Wauwil) to which they were sent if caught - generally by the Swiss army, since the civilian population usually abetted such efforts, helping the fliers reach the French underground at Annecy. The work limns in great detail the singularity of a determinedly independent, heavily armed, and, in the interior mountainous regions, largely impregnable democratic state existing in the midst of Nazi-occupied Europe and providing the only proximate refuge for thousands of airmen trapped in damaged and otherwise doomed planes, which often were guided to safe landings at the Dubendorf airport and elsewhere by the Swiss air force. The planes bore such nicknames as Dinah Mite, Touchy Tess, Twat's It To You, and Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti, the last - an allusion to the Sybil's encouragement to Aeneas in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and rendered in English as "No path is impassable to courage" - christened by an educated pilot named Martin Andrews, who later became a courier for U.S. spymaster Allen Dulles. Quite well written, the book can be criticized mainly for its tendency to whitewash the pilots' motives in escaping to Switzerland by asserting and attempting to document that there was not a single instance of a physically uninjured airman diverting an undamaged, well fueled bomber or fighter craft to Switzerland in order to escape the stresses of combat. Similarly, the work characterizes Allied bombings of Basel, Schaffhausen, and Zurich as invariably accidental strafings by disoriented pilots lost in cloud cover. For the view that such attacks were at least sometimes motivated by a clear intention to destroy industrial plants whose output contributed to the Wehrmacht's war effort, the reader is directed to Paul Erdman's factual if often maligned novel, The Swiss Account.

Refuge From The Reich: American Airmen And Switzerland During World War II tells the riveting story of how U.S. airman, shot out the skies by the Germans, parachuted, crash-landed, or otherwise escaped to Switzerland. There they encountered a country where food and heat were rationed, where every man was an armed solider subject to instant mobilization to counter the German threat. It was a small, mountainous country swarming with internees, refugees, and expatriates seeking protection from the certain death that awaited them from the Axis powers. By the end of the war there was a firm and pervasive sense of respect between the U.S. airmen and the Swiss who had given them secure protection from the Germans. Refuge From The Reich is a valued and informative contribution to the annals of World War II's European theater.

I decided to purchase this book after watching the Helvetica DVD and was so inspired by Swiss design, I had to check out this book. I was not disappointed, pages of full colour images, and detailed explanations about the artwork and the designers intended communication. Fantastic resource for graphic design students!

This book goes into immense detail, with countless full colour reproductions of some of the seminal works in the development of Swiss graphic design. It is well laid out, and with large margins which hold thousands of tidbits of related background information; the information on many of the important designers in this movement is invaluable, and many of the reproductions are of rare works which aren't normally found in other books.

The text clearly and concisely sets out exactly how and why graphic design in Switzerland developed as it did. It is useful not only as a reference book with great insight into the period, but also as a book which is endlessly fascinating to just pick up and browse through. Highly recommended

Una magnífica edición. Muchas imágenes, alguna un poco pequeña - para el tipo de imagen, se echa en falta quizá alguna imagen de detalle o incluso un encarte -, pero en líneas generales muy buena selección, y cantidad de imágenes.

Los contenidos interesantes, por tratarse de una generación histórica en el diseño gráfico universal. Es un libro muy recomendable.

This is a nice, well made book. It's a great reference for designers or art directors that need to put a Swiss spin on things.

Hollis's book, while extensive in its documentation and admirable in its visual organization of the Swiss developments, comes to several conclusions which should be questioned. The first is the disproportionate and misguided prominence afforded Theo Ballmer as a prime influence stemming from his experience at the Bauhaus. Whatever Ballmer's influence as a poster designer in the 20s was, he had gotten his essential training in the Basel school, which underwent its own ongoing and largely independent modernist development, prior to Ballmer's very brief time at the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus influence is deemed minor by the emerging Basel school, and Ballmer's later influence in teaching photography and lettering has to be considered a lesser one.

Significant also is the confusion in reporting influences in development of the cutting edge Geigy Pharmaceuticals graphics program where the influences of Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder as educators of the leading Geigy designers are missing. While this is inferred on page 162 in the statement that "the Geigy style originated in the teaching at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule," the key influences in Basel--Hofmann and Ruder--are not mentioned.

Similarly, Hollis attributes Müller-Brockman's "conversion" to the influences of Lohse and Vivarelli, the evidence being the concert hall posters of 1951 and 52. While this is definitely a move in that direction from an earlier illustrative style, the most convincing change, and the style by which Müller-Brockman is widely known, emerged on the hiring of graduates of the Basel school under Armin Hofmann in 1955. This means that Hofmann and Ruder pre-date Müller-Brockman's mature style instead of being placed as p. 214 as a separate and later development--and not as a precursor feeding the larger Swiss development from a more humanistic perspective than the more constructivist direction of the Zürich school. One can argue about which contributed most to the international prominence of Swiss design, but Hollis's own statement p. 215 regarding the world-wide significance of Hofmann's Graphic Design Manual, Principles and Practice, on education is telling. Müller-Brockman's more objective approach was probably more influential in the world of corporate graphics.

Hollis betrays a bias, perhaps, in his strange analysis of Hofmann's Tell poster and omits such key poster achievements as the "Switzerland in the Roman Era" (1957). It is unfortunate that Hollis did not interview Armin and Dorothea Hofmann. They are few of the remaining key figures from the era of Hollis's investigation.

Love the book and the message behind it. Want to send to friends. Is there a French and also a German tranlation? will buy both.

urgent reply requested

This book was THE BEST I have ever read! I finished it in just two days and it was GREAT

Aviators Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones toggle linear narratives of their around the world journey. There's lots of emphasis on what would appear like almost every altitude, groundspeed and directional change. Still, this is perhaps the most important element to success (the weather and catching the right winds aloft) and these frequent alternations between voice of Jones and Piccard keeps the reader consumed. Yes, it can be argued (as Piccard and Jones have to agree) that the two weather wizards at Breitling base in Geneva are just as much the heroes. Some pilot introspection, humor and color images make for the ideal armchair adventure. We are made to understand that great grandson of Jules Verne supported this endeavor (greatest integrity tie to simple love of flight) more than the other attempts (financiers and simply record seekers). As such, and from this pool, it's probably with the most pure love of flight from Jones and Piccard that we are priviledged to share in this fantastic journey.

... as to what a great accomplishment it was to do this balloon trip. A good read that lets you share the experience .... no macho image, a honest written book about a extraordinary accomplishment.

I'm writing this review having only read the first 112 pages of this fantastic real-life, just-yesterday-adventure ( I kinda know how it ends...), but the good feelings that I get from hearing the first hand account of Bertrand and Brian's epic balloon has sent me out finding copies to give to friends for the Holidays. Their down to earth ( no pun intended ) narrative, while maintaining a soaring spirit of adventure reminds me of stories from favorite teachers and mentors from my past. Open this book while in your favorite chair before a warm fire, and soon you'll feel as if they are sitting across from you telling the story themselves.

This book provides a complete listing of movement caliber & historical information in a very straightforward fashion. It also includes close up photos of some 200 individual watches and also includes a helpful, though outdated, pricing guide. It is an indispensible reference book bound in top-quality heavy duty binding. I found it to be worth every penny I paid.

Everthing previously written about the book is correct. What is not: the book does not have a price guide, like one reader said. After all, it's a watch movement's book! How can it have a price guide? The book have very good pictures, but 70% of them are in black and white. I didn't rate this book 5 stars, in fact, because it does not have german to english translations in the schemes of watch movements and pictures that have something written in german. Finally, the book is a little bit disorganized, since it does not have an index or different type fonts to "tell" you that you are in another chapter.

Added:

After reading the book, i found the price lists. It's one book's page...

This is a great book for you Rolex and Omega lovers (as well as other fine Swiss watches). It covers only Swiss wristwatches but it does a nice job of it. Lots of black and white (as well as some color) close ups of faces and movements. There is a table to tell the approximate range of years when specific caliber movements were produced. I'm certainly not an expert but I would recommend this book for those who are getting into the hobby of collecting fine Swiss automatic movement (self-winding) watches.

P.S. Look elsewhere for information on modern quartz or early manual winding watches. If you like bumper and/or full rotor automatic winding wristwatches then this book is for you.

Well researched, technical details to a useful degree for collectors, list of calibers, good photos.
One of my favourites, be it for research on specific models or to just flick through from time to time.

A great book, with almost all the automatic movement ever made. With detailed technical info and great pictures, this book is certainly worth it.