For travelers everywhere. If you like the travel writing of Bill Bryson, Pico Iyer, and Anthony Bourdain, you will love Peaks and Valleys. Tibetan Buddhists believe that making a journey around a sacred site brings merit in the next life. Author Matthew Sims believes that meaningful travel brings merit in this life. After the death of his closest friend, New York jazz guitarist Scott Sherwood, Sims takes a journey alone and on foot across the Alps. Along the way he meets a group of septuagenarian Austrian superwomen, a Tibetan refugee, a legendary chef who is a dead-ringer for Mussolini, and others who either help or hinder him on this 250 mile journey across parts of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. This sometimes humorous, sometimes touching travel memoir takes readers through stunning landscapes and quaint villages and uncovers much about the kindness of strangers as well as the colorful history of the central Alps (think witch hunts, sheep obsessions, avalanches, and assassins in bear suits).