THE SOPHISTICATED TRAVELER: Enchanting Places and How to Find Them: From Pleasant Hill to Katmandu

An easy chair, a glass of wine and this book in hand on a stormy day--and you've got a stylish antidote to cabin fever. These gleanings from The New York Times Travel section (the fourth in a series) transport one variously to sun-drenched isles, a Shaker village (the ""Pleasant Hill"" of the title), the Himalyan foothills, the African bush and far Cathay. They are written by the famous (William F. Buckley, Jr., John Chancellor, Hammond Innes) and by others whose names resonate no celebrity status. The writing is inevitably uneven and, if none of it approaches that of the brothers Durrell, it is sometimes sufficiently evocative to tempt one to dial the nearest travel agent. It is hard to resist Margaret Atwood's description of Copenhagen's famous amusement park: ""every curve and curlicue of the original nineteenth-century ironwork structures--the skeleton of Tivoli, if you like--is outlined with small colored lights, red, orange and yellow. . .Tivoli seems to float, like a school of fragile jellyfish or the interior of a Venetian glass paperweight, suspended in time."" There is also Barbara Goldsmith's sudden realization that present-day China, with its Harry James music and hotels with buff velvet couches sporting antimacassars, transports us to another era. ""This is the way China perceived the West when the door slammed shut in 1949, and this is what they have recreated for Western tourists. . ."" In all, a satisfying, if at times pedestrian, smorgasbord for the traveler within us all. With tips on what to do, where to stay, etc. at each exotic destination.