5 comments about VegOut Vegetarian Guide to New York City (Restaurant Guidebooks for Vegetarian and Vegan Diners).

1. I have now bought a few copies of this book -- one for my office and three as gifts. It's super useful (even if you're not a full-on vegetarian): the author includes a lot of restaurants that serve a "full menu with vegetarian choices" as well as strictly vegetarian and vegan establishments. It's organized by neighborhood and offers highly-detailed reviews. Really terrific.



2. I'm a life-long omnivore but my boyfriend recently became vegan, I thought we would never be able to find a restaurant to suit both our tastes. Recently I came across this book and it is wonderful. Who knew there were so many vegetarian/vegan restaurants in New York City? The listings break down restaurants to their most minute details and make them approachable even to those who know very little about vegetarian/vegan cuisine. In addition to the ample information this book contains pull-out maps that make planning a trip even easier. I seriously recommend it for any vegetarian New Yorker, or for those dating one. Enjoy!



3. This book is part of a new series of vegetarian guides to major cities. The pocket or purse-sized guide is packed full of reviews and information about restaurants around New York-Manhattan and the five boroughs. The guide is organized by neighborhood, and includes a nice map of all the locations listed in the book. Within the neighborhood section, the locations are listed alphabetically, but there is an index by cuisine at the back of the book.
   
   Each Restaurant is rated for quality and price and has a key to whether the location is vegetarian, vegan, or a conventional menu with vegetarian choices. There's a short description for each restaurant which provides useful information about the location, sometimes describing favorite dishes. Because the book was written by one person, Justin Schwartz, who reviewed all the restaurants himself (!), it is useful to read the introduction to get a feel for his style and what he likes and doesn't like. (For instance, he loves falafel, so there are endless choices of great places to find it all over the city).
   
   There are many fantastic restaurants listed in Veg Out that I wouldn't have heard of otherwise, but the author also spends a lot of time describing one or no-star restaurants, when I think he simply could have listed the location with a caveat to stay away. The size, convenience and well-stocked pages of this guide make it a great book to carry on your next trip to the city. --Amy O'Neill Houck



4. When I first started exploring NYC, I got a Zagat guide that listed only a handful of veg-friendly restaurants. Rather than curse the darkness, I bought this handy guide and use it all the time. I've used the book to find some truly unique vegetarian places.
   
   As a falafel junkie, I liked the Top Ten Falafel list that the author gives. I think the guide could improve with a diversity of viewpoints (the Zagat method), but I imagine that will come with future editions.
   
   Bottom Line: It's a well written and researched vegetarian guide to NYC. What more can you really ask for?



5. Used by my college bound daughter in her move to NYC. She says she has found some great vegetarian restaurants with this book

2 comments about The Century in Times Square.

1. a well balanced book of pictorials displaying times square in new york through the years. a nice coffe table book



2. This small volume is a photo essay that really captures Times Square during various stages of the 20th Century as the title claims. The pictures are fabulous with some wonderful page to page contrasts of the same views years apart. As someone who grew up near Times Square I found the photos from the 50's and 60's particularly striking since they reminded me of buildings and landmarks that are now gone. This is no comprehensive history just a nice collection of pictures with some commentary but I think it was worth having in my collection.

1 comments about New York Notorious: A Borough-By-Borough Tour of the City's Most Infamous Crime Scenes.

1. I'm reading this book in one sitting and I'm almost at the end. I just can't put it down. It's honest, brutal but also very humorous! Definitely recommended!!

3 comments about Cruising Guide to the Hudson River, Lake Champlain & the St. Lawrence River: The Waterway from New York City to Montreal & Quebec City.

1. We purchased this book in anticipation of a Lake Champlain cruise this summer (2005). Excellent description of anchorages, which is exactly what we were looking for. Many photos, too bad they are all B&W.
   The only thing I would like to see is a new edition, the current one is 4 years old, and as such, I would expect some of the marina information to be out of date.



2. I bought this mostly for Lake Champlain, but it seems to be a fairly comprehensive guide to boaters along the Hudson River, through Lake Champlain and on up to the St. Lawrence River. It offers information on the local marina's and sightseeing. I wish the maps had been a little more comprehensive, but in general I think I will find alot of use for the book.



3. A previous review noted they had an outdated version. This is the new 2006 version that I just received. Great read and a must book to keep on board if you are cruising any of these waterways.
   Contains Restaurants, Marinas, Gas, Food Supplies Side trips and Safe bays to Anchor along the way etc.
   
   Pictures and history of each town and port you will be approaching. Shipped free and makes a great gift for any boater who be might traveling to the covered regions. Nice coffee table book if you live in the regions too!

2 comments about New York City: A State of Mind.

1. The book is very disappointing. The book consists of badly manipulated photos of New York City scenes. It is a lousy book on New York City, as well as a lousy travel book.



2. This is a good book for those who want a souvenier of their time in New York. It's a collection of New York photographs that make you feel like you're back in the city. Good for the coffee table or a guest room.

1 comments about Sanctuary (Creating the North American Landscape).

1. The title of Sanctuary refers to a place of worship and also a state of mind: Thomas Roma places these in visual perspective, locating sacred parts of the community within the Brooklyn area and charting the efforts of generations to leave their mark. His excellent black and white photos pack in contrasting images of different religious faiths and sanctuaries.

5 comments about Empire City.

1. this book is a masterpiece for anyone on the search. if you are one of those lower east side hipsters who thinks theres no success like failure, but failure's no success at all, then this book is for you. it leans into the kernel, and asks the right questions from beginning to end. get ready to strap on your conceptual goggles and prepare for some authors intention. from joan didion's "goodbye to all that" to walt whitman's "crossing brooklyn ferry" this book keeps the faith all the way.



2. I bought this book as soon as it was in stores because David Dunbar, my former teacher, wrote it and he is a GENIUS. Reading the essays and stories between the covers was an even greater experience than owning the work of a friend. It now sits on my coffeetable, waiting for my next trip to Dobbs Ferry, where I will ask David to inscribe the title page with his autograph. Each essay is packed with all the feeling and emotion to be found in the city, in all of its people and buildings and history. To read this book is not simply to follow words on a page...It is to experience the greatest city on Earth. From Joplin to New York and back again, this book, and CITYterm, have together been one of the most enlightening opportunities I have ever had.



3. Editors Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar have amassed an enormous collection of essays, letters, diary entries, and poems about New York written by New Yorkers and visitors to the city from the dawn of the modern age (ca. 1600) to just after the ravages of 9/11. While an overwhelming majority of the pieces are pro-Gotham, I was glad that Messrs. Jackson and Dunbar had the wisdom and integrity to present some works that express anxiety and doubt about New York's status. The result is an extensive, celebratory, sometimes warts-and-all biography of the world's greatest city. As Mr. Jackson remarked in the 1999 Ric Burns New York Documentary, New York is not a stagnant, static thing: "New York is always becoming". He and Mr. Dunbar are to be congratulated for reminding us that New York's biography is long, and with a lot more greatness to come.
   
   Rocco Dormarunno,
   author of "The Five Points, A Novel"



4. Superlatives seldom meet the mark, except EMPIRE CITY. This is a book of superlative moods, the city of true night and day, and of gifted writers meeting on Gotham's every old and new corner. Each in their own time, they're overwhelmed by the city's human vastness, its diversity, even attracted to its loneliness - the city's unique ability to confer absolute privacy in neighborhoods and buildings that rise into the sky.
   
   To paraphrase, one writer said, "No matter the hour, there's always something exciting happening in New York." Like rubbing minds with Jack Kerouac, or going uptown with Federico Garcia Lorca, and James Baldwin - or rooting for the Yankees with Bruce Catton. Last night I sat ringside at the Polo Grounds for the Firpo/Dempsey fight; the day before I broke my back as a laborer on the Brooklyn Bridge; tonight I'm taking the ferry to see Whitman's leaves of grass. And after that, supper at Delmonico's. If I have energy enough come morning, it's off on the Half Moon to discover Manhattan - and you're welcome to come along.
   
   I haven't even scratched the surface, because there's always something wonderful to do in Jackson & Dunbar's superlative collection, EMPIRE CITY.



5. Here's a wonderful collection of diverse writings about New York City ranging from an account of Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage down the river that took his name to a very poignant piece about 9/11 by a member of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's staff. Articles by such well-known writers as O'Henry, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck (all who have lived in the Empire City) are included. Each selection has a brief introduction packed with interesting facts about the City and the writer of the piece. A great read and reference.

No comments about AMERICAN MAP CORPORATION NEW YORK CITY SLICKER.

No comments about The Complete Idiot's Guide to New York City (Complete Idiot's Guide to).

1 comments about The Color of a Great City (New York Classics).

1. Dreiser is considered a major American novelist, and like many writers, he spent a good portion of his career working for newspapers and magazines. The thirty-eight sketches here originally appeared in various New York newspapers and Dreiser's own magazine, The Bohemian. Around 3-10 pages each, they are vivid portraits of New York City between 1900-15, but not of the high life. Rather, the pieces "are the very antithesis.. of all that glitter and glister that made the social life of that day so superior. Its shadow, if you will, its reverse face." This was a time when, as he writes in his foreword, "...the city, as I see it, was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic then than it is now" and there were "greater social and financial contrasts."
   
   The pieces can be roughly divided into those about people, those about places, and a few more abstract pieces about the mood of a place or time. All are drawn from his years of wandering the streets with an observant and curious eye, and those about people tend to be the strongest and of most interest to the contemporary reader. As Dreiser wrote, "I was never weary of spying out how the other fellow lived and how he made his way." Anyone interested in the social history of New York will find such pieces as "Bums", "The Toilers of the Tenements", "The Track Walker", "The Pushcart Man", "The Bread-Line", "Our Red Slayer" (about a butcher in an abattoir), "The Man on the Bench", "The Men in the Dark", "The Men in the Storm", "The Sandwich Men" and others well worth reading. his writing on place tends to be very good too, especially in "The Waterfront", "The Car Yard", "A Vanished Seaside Resort", "A Wayplace of the Fallen", "The Bowery Mission", and "Christmas in the Tenements." Less interesting are his more clunky poetical musings, such as "The Flight of Pigeons", "On Being Poor", "The Realization of an Ideal", "The Beauty of Life" and "The Freshness of the Universe." The prose throughout is a little clunky and old-fashioned, but the subject matter is what's important, and as Dreiser writes "they bear, I think, the stamp of their hour."