America's 100 Best Places to Retire: The Only Guide You Need to Today's Top Retirement Towns

This book blends highly readable personal accounts with essential statistics on climate, cost of living, taxes, housing costs, crime rates, and health care.

This is a book with an underlying assumption that may not be correct. Stay where you are and make the best of it. I did.

While interesting this book leaves a little to be desired. A Better choice would be the newest edition of PLACES RATED.

Some towns seem to have a permanent place on the sweetheart lists of books dedicated to relocation and retirement. It is unusual to see such books without Charlottesville, Virginia, Branson, Missouri or Grand Junction, Colorado and indeed these locales, along with 97 others, fill the pages of AMERICA'S 100 BEST PLACES TO RETIRE.

This is a helpful book, but not an indispensable one. A good half of the towns or counties listed here are also in the 203-item RETIREMENT PLACES RATED (2004), which uses statistics far more than AMERICA'S 100, and generates competitive rankings. AMERICA'S 100 does, though, look at its places in a great deal more detail. An info box in each chapter, alphabetized by town name, offers brief stats as to climate, hospital beds, major housing developments and the like, as well as contact lists for the various Chambers of Commerce or whatever other agency is responsible for promoting each place. This brings in some objective data into what otherwise is a subjective process.

But the bulk of each chapter is given up to a narrative description of each particular place's "vibe" and a series of interiews with residents who relocated there either in middle age or during retirement. These are almost always middle-class couples with enough money to spend on middle-rank (or above) housing, or the wherewithal to build their own. Those interviewed will be a mix of people from the same region and those from far away, who fell across their new communities through a combination of research, personal recommendations, and plain old serendipity--stumbling across it on vacation, say. Together with the info box, such narrative discussions average three pages per town, or the equivalent of a medium-sized magazine article (no photos, though). I did feel, though, that many of these (admittedly subjective) town descriptions were quite boosterish; if any of these places is saddled with a rotten economy or a soaring crime rate, you're not likely to hear about it here.

Perhaps the most useful--or at least most enjoyable--aspect of AMERICA'S 100 is its listing of ten "Top 10" towns from its ranking, using categories such as "Best Budget Towns," "Best Beach Towns," "Best College Towns," and so on.

One caveat--America teems with the retired and soon-to-be retired. Therefore the housing costs in this book, which are at least four years old, may be fairly on the mark in some instances but woefully understated in others. One solution is to contact the chamber of commerce listings, where your address will inevitably be passed on to local realtors, most of whom belong to the local C of C. AMERICA'S 100 doesn't overwhelm the reader with its number of locations or hard data, but it does its best to convey the real feeling, the experience of living in each place.

Excellent referral information and explicit for cost, weather, local features, and amenities

This book could have done a little better job in giving information. If you were interested only in the best places to retire in order it is good. However, I would have liked more information than what was given.