The time traveler's handbook 18 experiences from the eruption of Vesuvius to Woodstock

IT'S POSSIBLE TO HAVE a crush on a guidebook. Like that more famous fount of lovable nurturing - the cute teacher in a cardigan - guidebooks gently usher you into new, potentially life-altering experiences while somehow making you believe that the rice-producing regions of the Po River Valley are all about You, You, You. While "The Time Traveler's Handbook" didn't quite instill in me such heights of affection, I nevertheless listened with unflagging attention and never missed a class. As its subtitle indicates, this jocular, fact-filled volume imagines what it would be like to witness or participate in various historical events, complete with tips on where to eat, what to wear, what the weather will be like, where to stay and how dire the bathroom situation will be. "History repeats itself," the authors write. "First time as tragedy, second time as vacation." Hindsight, of course, would be a huge boon to any traveler: Think of the thousands who, had they been informed of the overcrowding and heavy rains they'd meet at the Woodstock festival, might have more happily channeled their energies into attending a mellow Odetta concert or pressing wheat pods into clay. But hindsight both giveth and taketh - when the book has you go to the 235th Olympic Games in Greece, in A.D. 161, the authors helpfully tell you to enjoy the six-foot-tall sculpture of Nike before it's removed to Constantinople in the fifth century and destroyed in a fire. But at the "Rumble in the Jungle," the 1974 smackdown between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, you're told you won't be allowed to bet, since you already know who jungle-rumbled better. James Wyllie, Johnny Acton and David Goldblatt are to be commended for the scrupulous attention they pay to toilets throughout the ages. Once you learn that, as a crew member of Captain Cook's first epic voyage (1768-71), your commode is "simply a hole cut in a long plank extending out from the bow of the ship," you have fully apprehended the living, squirming truth behind a hoary, ossified cliché. Travel: so broadening. Similarly, I loved seeing how ubiquitous mud was in these historical events. It reigned at Woodstock, of course. But it also oozed out at the 1520 meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and at the Women's March on Versailles in 1789, where peasants threw it at the carriage transporting Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. During your Captain Cook voyage, you find that the canals in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, "have become stagnant pools teeming with millions of mosquitoes and caked in foul-smelling mud littered with human waste and dead animals." (Though this breeding ground of dysentery will wipe out several of your shipmates, you will be slipped antimalarial medication by a company representative. Hindsight + authorial godliness = "Who loves y a, baby?") There's a very tasty kind of schadenfreude to be gained from imagining your time-traveling self enduring the rigors described in these pages. But what's missing is a strong authorial voice. I enjoyed the audacity of being told, while watching the young Beatles perform in a Hamburg club in 1961, to buy some of the appetite suppressant known as Preludin from the 62-year-old Toilettenfrau in the men's room to put me "in sync" with the performers. But such gonzo advice made me wish the book's voice were more inimitable, more Let's Go or Cadogan than Fodor's or Frommer's. That said, I've strapped on my time-traveler goggles. Scarf: securely fastened. And I've filled my carry-on with nothing but Imodium and wellies. HENRY ALFORD is the author of five books. He has written humor articles for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.