Moon Handbooks O'Ahu: Honolulu, Waikiki, and Beyond

This is a high quality guidebook from respected company Moon Handbooks. I love the smaller format, medium-small type, and thin pages, so when you tote this along, it is very lightweight. It's also very durable for a paperback--it's meant to be carried around in your backpack during your journeys. This covers just the island of Oahu, which is home to Waikiki and Honolulu. It's broken up into chapters on the land, the ecology, the history, arts & music, sporting & recreation, and so on. All of this makes great plane ride reading. The bulk of the book is a geographically-divided tour around the island, listing beaches, attractions, accomodations, food & drink, etc. I used this to get around Waikiki and found all the info to be up to date and very useful.

This book contains a lot of information about the island and its many beaches. I bought this book from AAA before my first visit to Hawaii. What really surprised me about this book was how the first few chapters were about the Land, Flora & Fauna, History, Government & Economy, and People of the island. From these pages I learned more about the island and its people than your average Hawaiian sun-worshipping tourist. The book also offers lots of ideas and information for Sports & Entertainment, Shopping, Food and Drinks. Each different area of the island is detailed with a map and minute details about the beaches. The book lacks the colorful touristy postcard pictures but makes up for it through the sheer amount of information (and good organization) for everyone, be they young or old, jocks or bums, artists or history-buffs, food-connoisseurs or Hawaiian-drink enthusiasts. Overall a great buy, and will use it on all future trips to O'ahu. NOTE: This book covers O'ahu island exclusively (and not any of the other 6 Hawaiian islands). There is information on how to reach the other islands though, but nothing beyond that.