Louisville barely registers on most folks' list of hip places to travel, but it comes alive each year in the days before the first Saturday in May when this not-quite Southern, not-quite Midwestern Ohio River town turns on the charm for the Kentucky Derby Festival.

WSJ: Where to Go When the Horses Aren't Running

It is the charm of this book that the circle never quite closes that, in its final pages, history itself becomes another foreign country, another adventure.

ECONOMIST: Maori and Europeans