2 comments about New York's 50 Best Places To Take Children, 3rd Edition (City and Company).

1. Awesome book with great suggestions- well written, easy to use! We and the kid loved the suggestions.



2. I would give this book 3 1/2 stars if I could.
   
   Buy this if you want to get to know NYC attraction if you live in New York. It made me excited about getting to NYC. Buy another book if you want a resource that can help plan where to go during a vacation stay.
   
   I bought this book along with another well known travel book. I liked reading this book a lot more as it was much better written. It suffers in comparison with the other book because it's just not that useful when in NYC.
   
   Regrettably, it wasn't up to do date -- like recommending the USS Intrepid while the attraction is closed. That's okay -- just not great.
   
   Moreover, as a book for vacationing, it wasn't much use when we got into NYC. A map would have been great. It's best for reading ahead of time and thinking about places to go but not for planning on the go or working out things just a day or two in advance.

No comments about Manhattan in Detail: An Intimate Portrait in Watercolor.

No comments about Hamptons Pleasures.

1 comments about Hagstrom Nassau County, New York Street Atlas.

1. This is a very comprehensive street guide to Nassau County. It is easy to find where you are going by using it. This Atlas sure beats fighting with fold up maps and struggling to read these maps with their tiny print, even when using a magnifier and wearing reading glasses. If you do a lot of traveling in Nassau, perhaps you should consider owning one of these guides. The guides from Hagstrom for the five boroughs of New York and Suffolk county are of equally fine quality. I would be lost without these guides! :-)

5 comments about An African in Greenland (New York Review Books Classics).

1. A man in Africa becomes intrigued with Greenland and finds a way to get there, live with Greenlanders--what a story! He is also clear-eyed and unsentimental about what he experiences. A fast, worthwhile read.



2. One of the most unusual travel books ever written, covering two exotic societies in the eyes of the west: animist West Africa and the eskimos of Greenland. Written originally in french about 25 years ago, and covering events happening in the 50s and 60s, the book starts as Tete-Michel Kpomassie, a teenager in his native Togo, nearly dies in a fall from a tree. After that, his father sends him to a local python cult in the jungle to cure him. In gratitude, the father decides Tete is destined to become a priest in the cult. But Tete has another ideas. While recovering from his injuries, he finds by chance a book about Greenland and became obsessed with the idea of going there. By a sustained effort of will, Kpomassie worked his way through Africa and Europe before arriving in Greenland after several years. Being possibly the first African to visit Greenland, and the first black person most of the Greenlanders had ever seen, he becomes a minor celebrity. He travels up north through the coast of west Greenland, stopping in several villages, where he was invariably taken into someone's home as a guest. He candidly writes about his shock about what he saw as a lack of personal hygiene on the part of the greenlanders as well as their sexual promiscuity. Kpomassie is an excellent observer. The first chapters are wonderful, as he let us see an animist society from the inside. And his travels in Greenland are fascinating too.



3. I loved the premise of this book, and couldn't wait to read it with my book group. However, the book itself wasn't as good as I had hoped. I lost interest before the halfway point, and struggled to finish it.



4. For anyone interested in unique travels and traveler's perceptions, this book is a must read. Thankfully, the author, Kpomassie, devotes several chapters to his life in Togo; it's essential that the reader see what his life was like in 1940's and '50's sub-Saharan Africa in order to judge the contrast between his edge-of-jungle childhood and the world of freezing waters and rocky crags of Greenland. When I first heard about this book, I thought it impossible for a black west-African to even conceive of such a voyage, let alone have interest in an ice-bound place. But the author--as he narrates--shows that all voyages and voyagers are similar: the idea is born in the young person's mind, he envisions himself there, he makes a break with his homeland and family, he finds key supporters in people inspired by his vision, and his French "adoptive father" becomes the sponsor of his voyage.
   
   Kpomassie takes eight years to get from Togo to Greenland, working in Europe along the way. He is not at all disgruntled with the French (or Germans) the former colonizers of his homeland; rather, his ability to speak French enables him to find good jobs as well as the friends who believe in him. "I landed merely by showing my identity card," Kpmoassie writes, "and found that France is a hospitable nation: despite the storm of ill feeling at the time of our countries' [sic] independence, no restriction was imposed upon our entry into the former mother country" . . . . I felt freer in France than on African soil" (58-9).
   
   I feel certain that much has changed in the relationship between black Africans and Europe in the forty years since the author made his travels. For example, today the contrasts between Togo, France, and Greenland are less obvious because of "modernization" and creeping monoculture. In contrast, it seems to me that in the 1960s--when cultures were still quite different--people took their cultural differences less seriously than we do today, despite the spread of said monoculture and the increase of photographs and documentaries that makes the world somewhat familiar to everyone.
   
   What's really unexpected about this book is that Kpomassie finds a Greenland and an Inuit or Eskimo people, who are--it seems to me--in a cultural upheaval. For one thing, the impact of human activity on the ecosystem is not yet understood. Most alarmingly, the impact of Denmark and Danish people on the Natives of Greenland is not yet calculated; there is a crisis of morality, religion, and of old and new ways that--for me--was at times dismaying. The children and the women pay the highest price for this cultural change.
   
   Somewhere inside this book is a great untold story, a book within a book. If it could be told, it would be by an Eskimo about Kpomassie's effects on the Greenlanders. Also, another subtext to this book is that for the author to leave Togo, he had to have an upheaval in his own life. Kpomassie gives us only the surface of his break with his family and Togoland culture. What we know, in retrospect, is that Togo was having its own cultural upheaval: The young Tete-Michel Kpomassie questioned his family's belief in the snake rituals and the jungle priestesses. His growing fear of family tradition conjoined with his discovery of a book on Greenland, planted a seed in his mind that propelled him out into the cold north, the land of very long, dark winters.



5. This book was published in 1981 and centers on the author's adventures around 1966-67 in Greenland, the ice-covered island the size of Europe with a tiny population scattered along the coast.
   
   Born in French Togoland in West Africa, Kpomassie developed a passionate interest in Greenland after reading about it as a teenager. He left home shortly afterward in 1958 and, having little money, spent eight years working his way through Ghana, Senegal, France, Germany and Denmark before finally boarding a ship for his ultimate destination. It appears he was the first black African to visit Greenland, and his descriptions of his reception on arrival there are among the book's highlights.
   
   Landing near the island's southwestern tip, he traveled slowly up the western coast, staying for long periods of time with friendly families who kindly took him in. He'd hoped to reach the town of Thule in the northwest, but made it only two-thirds of the way before deciding to return home to share his experiences with his countrymen. Though he never reached his final destination or got to live in an igloo like he'd planned, he enjoyed many other experiences such as driving a dogsled, seeing icebergs up close and fishing on the ice.
   
   His descriptions of people and landscapes were impressive, bleak though they were at times. There were many scenes of poverty, squalor, boredom and heavy drinking among the locals. On the other hand, nearly everyone was very open and sharing with him. The writer was a good observer and often compared local practices with those of his own culture to find differences and similarities. He was interested especially in how children were indulged, how the adults got along with each other, treatment of the elderly, beliefs and rituals concerning death, prohibitions on killing certain animals, and so on.
   
   Descriptions of some of the people he met were memorable, as were those of things like riding a dogsled, the local diet, the packs of half-starved dogs running around the villages, the absence of trees, the extreme cold and the polar night. One night, he was astonished to see the aurora borealis for the first time, though the locals were so used to it they didn't bother to look outside.
   
   Most admirable to me were the author's good sense, quiet humor and ability to adapt to each new experience. How can you not admire someone who traveled to such a different place and embraced it? And for the most part, the local Inuit people embraced him. A lesson reinforced by this book was that despite all the cultural and language differences, people are people, and they can find ways to relate so long as they keep an open mind.
   
   A sample of his writing from late in the book, after he planned to leave: "Now that I had been sharing these people's lives for sixteen months, their food no longer disgusted me, and I thought nothing of eating a breakfast of seal fat and dried intestines every morning . . .
   
   "'But we'd be glad to have you with us always!' old Mattaaq kept telling me. 'We know you. Do you want for anything here? We have everything a man needs--seals and fish in the sea beyond counting. You know that, because you hunt and fish with my sons . . . But I understand you very well. After so many years away from them, you don't know what's become of your own folk, and you want to go back and see them, don't you?'
   
   "He may have been right. Do people ever know their true reason for embarking on a long journey? So many causes, motives and impulses intertwine to form the semblance of a reason."
   
   As a parting gift, the author's given a handmade necklace made from the tooth and claw of a polar bear. He writes, "My own grandfather would have made the same gesture with the same intention, using the trophies of a leopard; but he would have chosen a remote spot and a twilight hour, spoken arcane words, and enlisted all those minute preliminaries and accessories which, by swathing this simple act in mystery, would have given it increased significance. But here, in the land of the great cold, the daily ritual was stripped of that display. Here life was hard, and the pursuit of food more urgent than in the tropics."
   
   If there was anything I missed in this book, it was more description by the author of his travels' effect on his own emotions and thinking. He described actions, beliefs and other people well, but wasn't really that introspective.
   
   Though the author returned initially to Togo, eventually he went back to France, took French citizenship and lives there. Judging from this book, his perceptions of what it's like to live in France between cultures would surely be of interest. Unfortunately for those who read only English, it appears that nothing else he's written has been translated from the French.

1 comments about Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books).

1. I am enjoying this book very much. I was born in the Catskills and I am learning so much that my parents never told me. It is very well written.Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

3 comments about Moon New York State (Moon Handbooks).

1. This is the first Moon book I bought - I'm an ardent Lonely Planet fan and I regret this purchase. It seems moon books are written with oldies in mind. There is little - if any - information about activities to do which Lonely Planet takes care of. Some of the sections like the finger lakes are so badly written that I can't imagine anyone going there after reading them.
   
   This book feels more like a laundry list of places to go. If that is all that you are looking for, then it might work for you, otherwise, best stay away.



2. If you really love New York, and all its different facets, you will love this book. It takes you street by street and neighborhood by neigborhood through this captivating city. You not only get recommendations on must-see tourist spots, unforgettable places to eat and well thought out hotel recommendations, but this book gives you a wonderful view into the former life of each street and neighborhood it covers. So much of the history of a city like New York is lost when buildings are torn down and neighborhoods evolve, but this book takes you back in time and gives you the full picture of each fascinating place. I enjoy reading it, even when I'm not planning a trip!



3. Ms. Bird has done a wonderful job of covering New York City and state in a single volume. She manages to pack a ton of information between the covers of this book and includes a surprising level of detail on many out of the way places that other authors would have missed.
   
   I should also complement the Moon editorial staff for keeping this massive volume well-organized and flowing right along.
   
   In sum, this is an excellent pickup for anyone looking to familiarize themselves with NY state!

No comments about MoMA Highlights since 1980.

No comments about A Very New York Christmas.

No comments about Zagat 2009 New York City.