No comments about National Geographic Traveler Madrid (National Geographic Traveler).

No comments about Transforming Barcelona: The Renewal of a European Metropolis.

No comments about Espana (Guias del buen viajero).

5 comments about Spanish: Lonely Planet Phrasebook.

1. Bought the book before a vacation in Madrid. It was very useful and well organized. When I needed to look up a phrase, I found the book very easy to use. It gave more information that I needed!



2. I just returned from South America (Bolivia and Chile). This book was great to have with me over the past month. There are many instances where it came in handy. It is easy to pack and to carry. I recommend it to anyone traveling abroad to a Spanish speaking country.



3. You send me a message saying the whole order (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, was undeliverable.
   Why?



4. My girlfriend and I knew zero Spanish before travelling to Spain. Thanks to this guidebook we were able to get by in all the situations that we encountered. This book is absolutely essential for those who don't know the language, since Spaniards will warm up to you a lot more if you try to speak in their language. My only regret is that there wasn't enough on Catalan, but that is to be expected. Great product.



5. This guide is small enough to fit in a purse or pocket and full of lots of helpful information. I especially liked the foods section. It was easy to discretely pull it out while we were at the tapas bars and restaurants and figure out what was on the menu. My husband who knew no Spanish before our trip, used the helpful phrases verbatim, whereas I found the short dictionary in the back useful when a I couldn't remember certain words - they were almost always in there. There is even a Catalan and Basque phrase section. Highly recommended if you don't speak fluent Spanish.

No comments about Valencia Land of Wine.

5 comments about A Traveller's History of Portugal (Traveller's History Series).

1. I got the book today. First thing I did was check to see what the author says about the apparitions of Our Lady at Fatima. He wrote "The ecclesiastical authorities, eager to reap the fruits of fervent devotion - as so evident at Lourdes - were not slow to seize on their infantile delusions by further imposing on the gullible and largely illiterate peasantry. Pilgrimages were expediently organized. Inordinate sums were spent by Salazar in erecting a monstrous basilica at Fatima, consecrated in 1953, which is little less than an affront to any instinct of veneration, well-described as a "Spiritual Disneyland"." Tis enough! The author is an anti-Catholic bigot!



2. A basic comprehensive summary of Portugal's history. Nothing anti-Catholic about it. Today Fatima is indeed little more than Disneyland for religious zelots.



3. Read it with caution

   This book contains a lot of information, some correct some incorrect, some useful some unlikely to interest the general reader. Do you really want to read a page-long list of Visigothic kings? Worse than this kind of information is the considerable number of errors,as a typical mistake, "The Luciades". This is supposed to be "The Lusiads" (see "The Lusiads", Oxford World's Classics, a five-star book). This traveller's history puts together a lot of material from different sources, but does so unselectively and without checking for accuracy. This is as bad as the Tyson-Ward Portuguese books!




4. This is not really a history but mainly lists of events a large number of them presented in an unusual way and with the wrong date. Names are often spelt wrong, some beyond recognition. Others are quite amusing in their changed form, like Manrique (Manique). We the readers deserve better, much better. If you want a concise history of Portugal good for the traveller, then you have the right book in Portugal a Companion History by Jose Hermano Saraiva. That one is good!



5. I don't understand what all the fuss below is about. Some people must be upset with Mr. Robertson for reasons other than the actual content of the book. Yes, he does spell 'Os Luciados' a couple of different ways in this book, and that does seem to be poor editing; however, google indicates that the "misspellings" are all legitimate. I suppose a catholic might find fault with his characterization of Fatima as a "spiritual disneyland." But then, if he wrote about it from a Catholic perspective, it would be a theology rather than a history book.
   
   This book is very obviously meant to be a quick overview of Portugese history for people who are on vacation there. My book dealer even helpfully put it in the "travel" section, rather than the history section. Many times in my travels, I found myself in an interesting place, completely at the mercy of the cretinous author of whatever travel book I was able to procure for myself. Having a slim book like this I can read while travelling, and refer to while in museums and other places of culture (say, to remind myself who Luis de Camoes might be) makes the trip that much more exciting and relevant. While travelling, you do not want some vast tome, impossible to carry around with you: you want a light reference, which includes timelines, and, yes, lists of Visigothic kings. I think this book admirably succeeds in its purpose for Portugal. My trip was dramatically enriched by having this book along. I probably wouldn't choose this book in studying for a test on Portugese history, and I did find it a bit dry in places and perhaps a bit spare in others. I also allow there may be better examples of this 'travel genre' on the subject of Portugese history, but those weren't available in the bookstore. I think the average english speaking tourist to Portugal will be just as pleased with this book as I was.

3 comments about Travelers' Tales: Spain (.).

1. Having lived in Spain many years ago and visited several times since, I found this book to be the best thing anyone can read about the country without reading all of Iberia, Hemingway, etc. More important than a guide book, this is a guide to the soul of the country.



2. The book consists of 47 essays by different authors, each essay an average of 9 pages long, where the author gives their anecdotal story or insight. And then there is another 20 pages at the end of the "what to know when you travel there" stuff.
   
   It is a great idea for a book, and a you should read it if going to Spain, but I just wish they had used better authors. Nothing from Hemingway, Washington Irving, nothing from the Spaniards themselves like Cervantes and Lorca. The writing seems too modern, not deep, nor funny, nor penetrating enough: Not up to the task at hand. Although the writing is OK, there must be better insights written than these. This could have been a better book, considering the subject is Spain, it could have been a much much better book.



3. I highly recommend this book. You learn a lot about Spain, and it's people from it. It's a great read! makes you want to visit Spain.

5 comments about Running with the Bulls: Fiestas, Corridas, Toreros, and An American's Adventure in Pamplona.

1. As a paradoxically resisting and admiring reader and teacher of Hemingway for many years, I opened Gary Gray's "Running with the Bulls" on a recent summer evening with a similar sense of ambivalence. Described to me earlier as "Under the Tuscan Sun on adrenaline," my post-read corrective of "Running with the Bulls" would be: "More like 'Under the Tuscan Sun' on testosterone"--and with far more passion, character, and heart than Francis Mayes' aesthetically gorgeous but rather icy treatise on Tuscany.

   From the start, Gray displays a charming lack of self-consciousness about the ways in which his perennial quest for running with the Pamplona bulls in the July festival of San Fermin positions him as a Hemingway wannabe'. The author nods often and authentically to how Don Ernesto's "The Sun Also Rises," "Death in the Afternoon," and "The Dangerous Summer," motivated his own, original 1980 visit to Pamplona--and continues to inform his annual treks. Even so, the Hemingway intertextuality of "Running with the Bulls," never annoys. As Gray narrates twenty-two years of his own American adventures in Spain, the reader is rewarded with a retrospective animated by Gray's considerably unique sensibility. As these 17 or 18 separate pilgrimages to Pamplona from 1980-2001 weave together to form a single narrative tapestry about Spain, bullfighting, Pamplonese food and bar and folk culture, what impressed me was the distinctiveness Gray gives each vignette, often separated by many years. From the 1980 side trip to Tangiers with his then fiancee, Katie O'Toole, to the 2001 San Fermin's "next generation" running with the bulls with Gray's two oldest daughters, the reader is rewarded with lucidly recollected and deliciously described sensous detail. From the poppy fields and olive groves in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the numerous three-hour Spanish dinner with cocktails, wine, lamb, bull stew, scallops, flan and coffee (no paella?), Gray treats each meal, each bullfight, each side-trip and conversation with old American and new Pamplonan friends, with rich reverance, delivering them to the reader not as narrative description but as the stuff of life.

   Okay--so if this book has a flaw--and even the greatest of works does--it is the relentlessness of these details. By the second half of the book, without a larger personal tension or evolving historical, political, or social commentary to sustain them, the catalogues of bullfighting minutia, drinking escapades, and restaurant fare begin to function in the reader's imagination more as accounting ledgers than the rich layers of story-telling. But given how much the author is drinking and how little he is sleeping on this collage of separate trips, his ability to recall how a particular torero worked the bull in 1987, or the specific quality of a salty ham appetizer and rioja reserva wine in 1991, astounds and impresses. That said, the second half of the book often repeats rather than develops the themes of the travelogue's first part--at that point, I resisted the impulse to skim.

   But his book is so much more that an American hedonist's journal of Pamplonan bullfighting and festivals. I deeply admired the spiritual structure of the work. If Hemingway's and Gray's bullfighting rings are existential metaphors for the passion of life and the terrible but noble inevitabiltiy of death, Gray shows himself by book's end as adept if secualr a metaphysician as he is a partyer. Punctuating twenty-some years of narrative revelry in this text is a well-narrated political assisination, the birth of Gray's six children and the deaths of many more bulls. The work ends with a bittersweet memento morti as Gray meditates on the death of an elderly restaurateur and a young and dashing torero--both of whom had lived with what Gray values supremely, lives, and gives as a significant gift to his reader in each page of "Running with the Bulls"--aficion.




2. It has always been one of my goals to run with the bulls in Pamplona. I traveled to Pamplona, Spain 07/05/02 and ran on two of the days during the festival. I bought a copy of Gary Gray's book a few months before I left and I am so happy I did. It was an essential part of my preparation. Mr. Gray outlines the run and Pamplona through his own accounts and makes the book extremely enjoyable for the reader. If you are considering running with the bulls or even if you would like to learn more about San Fermin this book is a must! Mr. Gray does an outstanding job of educating the reader about the run and the events that follow.



3. Running with the Bulls starts with an enticing prologue that seems to set a wonderfully exciting pace for the book. But it quickly cuts off into nothing more than the author's travel journal about how he spent his summer vacation in Spain.

   The cover photo is amazing, but unfortunately it's the only good photo in the book. The rest are nothing more than snapshots of the author and his friends with a couple of good shots of bullfights.

   The book does provide some good information about fiesta, the encierro & bullfights - but better information is probably available elsewhere.




4. Gary Gray paints a picture of what it is like to partake in Pamplona's Fiesta De San Fermin. From the moment the rocket goes off during the encierro, to the afternoon corrida, Gary manages to share his love for fiesta and especially the people who make fiesta so great. If you have been or are thinking of going to Pamplona, you should read this book. It is a great learning tool to acclimate yourself to Pamplona and fiesta. Gary also gives you an insight to some of the moments during fiesta when you need a break and shows you more of Pamplona and Navarra.



5. The really interesting thing about reading Gary Gray's very personal memoir of his travels to Spain and his times in Pamplona's Fiesta is this: The experiences he shares which may seem so unique to the reader are experiences available to anyone who makes the journey to Pamplona each July, and Gray makes this point for the reader. He let's the reader know that in this very foreign culture with it's own age-old customs, traditions, rites and rituals an American can not only be easily accepted - -he or she can be embraced, indeed adopted by local Navarrans as Gray was by people who have become part of his family.

   When this book was published, it had been over thirty years since an American had published a book on Pamplona, and if there was one central point to make above all others, it is the point made that is referenced in the preceeding paragraph, i.e. this fiesta which seems so foreign from afar can seem very familiar up close.

   This is a personal story, an up close look through the eyes of one person and what the reader is able to see is well worth seeing.

No comments about The Rough Guides' Lanzarote Directions (Rough Guide Directions).

No comments about Fodor's Exploring Spain, 7th Edition (Exploring Guides).