3 comments about Rick Steves' Europe Map (Rick Steves).

1. My son and I went to 5 countries in Europe and wanted a full map of Europe. This map is reinforced paper without being bulky, so it travels well. Easy to read and has larger city maps included. A great addition to the city-specific travel guides.



2. The map was a bargin for the price, but if you want a full map of Europe, go elsewhere. This map does not include eastern Europe and Bosinia, Albania, Macedonia, Greece (which is the main problem becasue Greece is a popular tourist destination) and more.



3. I got this thinking it would get me started on planning my trip to Europe. I had a list of things I wanted to see. When I got the map I was so happy to see that all the tourist attractions were ALREADY MARKED on the map! They were clearly labeled and easy to locate and read. Great product...well worth the money!

5 comments about South America (Shoestring).

1. A must have four the traveler people! The go to South America



2. Used this book for a three month trip through Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. A friend who travelled with me had Footprint's guide to South America. While Lonely Planet had far and away the better maps, everything else about the Footprint book was better -- more information, more current information, and most importantly, broader coverage! There were many small towns that were not even included in the LP book. Even in the major cities, Footprint covered more sights and did so with more detail. If you are picking up a second book for a trip, by all means get the LP. But if you are only buying one, go with Footprint until LP seriously expands this edition.



3. This is a useful if flawed guide for backpackers and other budget travelers. This thick book (1,150 Pages) covers lodging, conditions, airports, regulations, and other vital information for 13 countries. The information is practical, useful, and substantial, and one can travel South America with this guide. But in trying to cover 13 countries the book is unavoidably limited on information for any one nation, city, or place, and the maps are at times less than adequate. There is also some out-of-date information (Argentina's Peso is NOT equal to one U.S. dollar) so travelers are advised to check other sources.
   
   If you will be traveling to only a couple nations in South America you would be better advised to buy a travel guide for each country. However, if you will traverse through many countries in this fascinating continent, this book is still a valuable reference tool.



4. I was very, very disappointed in this book and would have returned it but I had highlighted one article before looking at the book completely. This is probably a good book for a college student who will stay in hostels but as for a book to help find hotels and sightseeing places, it missed the mark completely.



5. Lonely planet is a great travelling guide - it gives you just enough information to get you by when you're in need, and leaves enough blanks for inspiration of your own.

5 comments about Fodor's Walt Disney World® with Kids 2008: with Universal Orlando and SeaWorld (Special-Interest Titles).

1. The Disney section is not updated. Several changes that occured in late 2007 are not included nor are many that are planned for 2008 - particularly related to dining. Birnbaum's 2008 contains much more accurate information. This book was highly recommended and we were VERY disappointed. You can also find most of her tips for free on the web. We will be returning our copy.



2. We used the 2007 edition last summer and the book was fairly useful. One of the biggest selling points were the breakdown of the rides. This goes for both the overview(scary or not ?) and the charts that break out height requirements. We did find some information to be seriously outdated(note to editors before heading to press). That said, the book - in combination with Disney podcasts and online communities - prepared us to get the most out of our family's WDW vacation.



3. I found the reviews and comparison charts very helpful in selecting our hotel and restaurants. The "insiders tips" were also very insightful. I relied on other guides to provide more detail about the parks and attractions, however.



4. This book was very helpful in planning out Disney trip. I wish it would have explained the rides a little more (which ones had loud noises for toddlers). Otherwise it helped us navigate the parks and plan our meals accordingly.



5. We've been on many trips to WDW, but after reading this book I wished I'd had it for the first one. Of all the WDW with Kids books I've read, this is the best. Lots of helpful hints and ideas on what to bring and what to see. Recommended highly!

5 comments about India - Culture Smart!: a quick guide to customs and etiquette (Culture Smart!).

1. I bought this guide because I think it is important to know something about a country's customs and etiquette practices before traveling there so one can be respectful of the country and its people. This book summarizes the customs and etiquette practices in an easy to use format and is also small enough to fit in your suitcase or to carry with you on your person.



2. I find this book very informative and a quick reference for Indian customs. Although, you cannot touch on every aspect of a culture in a small handbook, the author has taken great pains to explain ways and means. The only caveat to avoid faux paus is to actually memorize the customs before you visit.



3. I agree with the other reviewers, but I wanted to let readers know that much of this book is repeated, verbatim, in __Customs & Etiquette Of India (Simple Guides Customs & Etiquette)__ by Venika Kingsland. (Not sure who plagiarized whom...) Culturesmart India is worth the extra few dollars.



4. This book is a fantastic reference to anyone who is doing business with India either as a buyer or a provider. It gives comprehensive information about the country and its culture and should be an always-in-hand guide.



5. the book is great but the service from this source was extremely slow almost two weeks to get a book.

5 comments about Switzerland (Eyewitness Travel Guides).

1. Ideal for people who are going to Switzerland or for people who want to pretend they are going to Switzerland to impress a lady.



2. I'm not a seasoned or jaded traveler ... yet! So a comprehensive travel guide is critical to my preparation for a trip and a great way of post-filling information and details into some of the holes or places that I might have missed or had to rush through when I was actually on the trip. Along with photographs and trip journals, they're also a wonderful way to resurrect detailed memories of a trip long after you've returned home.
   
   Eyewitness Travel Guides seem to have the market beat by a long margin! That's not to say that Lonely Planet, Frommer, Michelin or the Blue and Green Guides miss the mark entirely but the Eyewitness series, in general, seems to be more informative. The photographs and illustrations instill a higher degree of keen anticipation and provide a better means of choosing in advance between a world of competing destinations and alternative tourist attractions.
   
   Their guide to Switzerland, in particular, was astonishingly accurate and complete - history, food, travel, hotels, geography, destinations, estimated costs, highlights, outdoor activities - every last one of them spot on and accurately described from the perspective of an actual trip through St Moritz, Lucerne, the Bernina Pass to Tirano, Italy and Interlaken. Even now the photographs of Swiss cuisine and cheese can set my mouth to watering!
   
   One noteworthy omission that my traveling companion and I discovered by accident - Switzerland offers a museum pass for 30 Swiss francs that will give admission for one month to virtually every museum in the country. That's a remarkable offer given that the countryside is positively littered with a host of attractive museums, castles and attractions most of which charge a 5 to 10 franc admission. We learned that little tidbit from the concierge of the Palace Lucerne Hotel - kudos to the hotel for over the top service and a great piece of advice!
   
   With that one small suggestion for addition to future editions, the Eyewitness Travel Guide to Switzerland easily earns a five-star review. And Switzerland, by the bye, is certainly a delicious five-star travel destination!
   
   Paul Weiss



3. I had purchased a similar book for my son about France to help him with his French language courses in high school. I ended up spending more time with it than he did, and when I saw the other country titles, I decided to purchase a few more. The Switzerland book is excellent in that it condenses a lot of information into a very portable volume. The photos and illustrations are fabulous and the background historical and cultural information is superb. The listing of accomodations and restaurants also appears to be very well researched and provides a starting point for further Internet research. My favorite part of Switzerland is the Bernese Oberland, and this book provides a genuine sense of what it is really like. I can definitely benefit from this book on future travel to Switzerland. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know more about the country, as well as for experienced travellers. Well done to the authors, editors, and publisher!



4. Pros: this guidebook has lots of pictures and gives lots of information region by region, detailed cut-outs of major historical buildings. I also found the pictures in the survival guide section useful, where they describe the various Swiss dishes and food/drink products.
   
   Cons: no information on how to get to different places by train (e.g. from Interlaken to Schilthorn or Jungfraujoch). I understand the guide cannot list train numbers and times, but at least it could have described how to, for example, get from Luzern to Mt. Titlis by train. Train travel is a big part of the Switzerland experience so this seems like a big omission. There's also not much information on hiking, even though this is a very popular country with hikers. An overview map of hiking trails would have been useful. However, there are other guides that cover hiking so this is a minor omission by comparison.



5. We had one week in Geneva and this guide pretty much explained everything there was to see. Well written, easy to use, very well organized, it was possible to get a handle on any large Swiss city in about 30 minutes.

2 comments about Frommer's Vancouver & Victoria 2008: with coverage of Whistler (Frommer's Complete).

1. This book has been very helpful in planning our trip to Victoria and Vancouver Island! Excellent recommendations for restaurants and hotels.
   If you are planning a trip to this area, this is the book to help you see it all! Many Thanks



2. This book has great info on planning trip to Vancouver and Whistler and now after reading about victoria, think I should add tht to the trip.

5 comments about No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach.

1. In this breezy book, there is an amusing photo of an In-n-Out Double-Double Burger with a pile of fries amid far more exotic dishes highlighted in the montage of images that constitute a chapter appropriately called "Food Porn". What I especially like about the photos is how real the dishes look since they have not been immaculately presented by a Williams-Sonoma food stylist. The food looks exactly how you would expect to see it if you were to order it at a street kiosk in Kolkata or a back-alley café in Hong Kong. This laissez-faire attitude accurately captures the spirit of this companion book to Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations TV series now in its fourth season on the Travel Channel.
   
   Anyone who has read Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly or The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, or seen his previous series, A Cook's Tour, on the Food Network, already knows his unique blend of streetwise sarcasm and culinary adventurousness. Fortunately, Bourdain doesn't alter his style one iota with his latest entry and immerses himself even more into the idiosyncratic cultures and customs that made his previous global travels so enjoyable. The book is, more or less, a photo album of stills taken from the show organized by geographic region. You see photos such as a warthog being pulled apart for cooking by Namibian tribesmen, a roast pig on glorious display in a Balinese street market, tireless workers in a duck processing plant in Montreal, and even what's left of the defunct Twinkie factory in Cleveland. In between, he inserts more personal photos of himself alongside the local inhabitants.
   
   On top of it all, Bourdain contributes his characteristic blurbs albeit briefly - sometimes obnoxious but usually quite amusing in his acid-tongued belligerence. It wouldn't be Bourdain if he wasn't a snarky jerk, but he compensates with his audacious palette and his innate ability to bond with most everyone he meets no matter how trying the circumstance. You have to respect a man who will try anything once, whether it's fourteen courses of foie gras or a sizable hunk of raw seal. Ironically, the most interesting chapter has nothing to do with food as it involves his inopportune presence in Beirut when the Israel-Lebanon conflict broke out. He vividly recounts how he and his crew were evacuated by the U.S. Marines amid skirmishes with Hezbollah supporters. By all means, experience the show first for a more complete sensory experience (except for taste, of course), but the book is still a fine keepsake of Bourdain's cocksure culinary audacity.



2. Yes, this is THE companion book to one of the most awesome shows on television right now. I was slightly disappointed that there was not more commentary, however, one redeeming factor and a reason you should have this book is for the "Best and Worst Bathrooms" around the world. Makes you glad for the dingy porcelain throne you have or jealous you don't live in Japan!
   Chocked full of photos taken during Bourdain's wild tours around the globe, this is a fantastic coffee table book for chefs across the board. Unfortunately, the book does not do the show justice and if you ever have the chance to partake of Bourdain's scathing wit and alcoholic charm, please do so! And yes, I hate Rachel Ray too my friend...I hate her too.



3. I should have perused this in more detail at the bookstore, but alas I got too excited to see another book by Mr. Bourdain. I finally looked at it this weekend and much to my disdain it is primarily pictures. Nice pictures, but only pictures nonetheless. There is some minor text but not enough. I was hoping to find out more back stories about what happened, biting commentary (related to the episode not FoddTV "chefs")maybe lists of places from the show, recommendations of restaurants to eat at, etc.
   
   I am a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain and of No Reservations, this book just didn't cut it for me.



4. If you're new to the works of Anthony Bourdain as well as his Travel Channel TV show "No Reservations" then this book might not be the best place for you to start. While the volume itself is a very handsome and well-produced book with oodles of great photos and minimal text, this particular title was written for the fan of Bourdain's ongoing TV series with plenty of behind-the-scenes glimpses at the adventures in getting his show made as well as snippets of appreciation toward his beloved crew. Fans of the show will find much to like as each country visited in the show's 3 year span is re-visited with familiar still shots of memorable moments we've seen before as well as new material. The highlights of the book though occur at the very end where Bourdain hilariously rates the best and worst toilets he and his crew have encountered in their world travels.



5. Do you like food? Travel? A wiseass chain smoking New York host? Then this is for you! A great book by a really cool guy, about a really cool show. It's an overview of places around the world Tony Bourdain and crew visited and featured on No Reservations, and it's filled with information that never, ever, EVER could have made it on the air. True fans of No Reservations might get more out of this than a reader who has never watched the show but anyone can pick this up and catch the tone and flavor of one of cable TV's most uniquely audacious hour-long events.

1 comments about Spartacus International Gay Guide 2008.

1. Spartacus saves time! Forget searching through endless website for information on the local gay scene. Who knows if the website even exists anymore or when it was updated the last time. Spartacus is ideal for planning your holiday. It is up-to-date (even though the gay scene changes all the time) and at least I am sure that the advertisers are still around when I visit their city. We don't have a better gay guide - Spartacus remains the number one for gay international travel.

5 comments about Route 66 Adventure Handbook: Updated and Expanded Third Edition (Route 66 Series).

1. Route 66 is also known as the Mother Road. In the early 1900's roads were built on the local or regional level. Work was spotty and haphazard. It was not until 1926 that the federal highway system was launched. In order to qualify for federal funding highways had to meet standards for surface quality and so on. Marking of highways became consistant across state lines. At first highways were marked by posting black and white shields along roads that already existed. So even though they were not originally built as a connected route, they became one. The major routes ended in a "zero" and stretched from coast to coast. Route 66 was a lesser route stretching from Chicago to Los Angeles.
   
   So how did Route 66 become the "mother road?" In 1939 when John Steinbeck wrote _The Grapes of Wrath_ and gave it that nickname. The Mother Road got a further boost just after WW II when Bobby Troup wrote a song called "Get Your Kicks on Route 66." About the same time Jack Rittenhouse realized that travel would increase in America and wrote _A Guidebook to Highway 66_. In the 1950's the federal government began construction of what we now know as interstate highways.
   
   Interstates often paralleled highways like Route 66. Unfortunately their limited access was often the death knell for small businesses that had existed alongside the older highways. Traveling Route 66 is a chance to see what was left aside so many years ago. Knowles organizes his book by state: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Knowles writes charming tales of Americana beginning with Chicago.
   
   My only complaint with this book is that Knowles too quickly begins with the Chicago fire of 1871 and progresses into the 1930's gangsters. Oh well. Along the route one just has to see the Cadillac Ranch. At the end of the route, Los Angeles (actually Santa Monica is the end of the route) is the site of the La Brea Tar Pits.
   
   This book is for the "heritage tourist," the person more interested in experiencing the roots of America than its theme parks.



2. Went on a roadtrip last week and traveled by lots of old Route 66 stops, and we were so happy we picked this book up beforehand. It has everything you need to know about the drive, and pointed us too areas that we would have just zoomed by otherwise. If you're going on any part of Route 66 pick this book up!



3. We took our vacation this summer with the intention of finding and driving as much of route 66 as practical for our intended travels. We did manage to travel almost a thousand miles along the route and this book helped us see and know far more than we could have easily found on our own. This wasn't our first foray onto "the mother road" but it was our most educational - due to having this handbook handy as we approached the various towns and landmarks on the route. There may be others that do as well or better, but this one provided all the information we wanted along the way.



4. The book was great for pointing out things to see along Route 66. I highly recommend it; however, I really, really wish that it included more directions and approximate mileage to find the items listed in the book. The Giant Ketchup bottle was about 20 miles off the beaten path. The Cherokee Indians Trail of Tears was close by route 66, but there were no directions on how to get there, so it took several hours and wrong turns to find something that was only 5 minutes away. An icon to indicate directly on route 66 or not would have been terrific and saved a lot of eye-strain trying to find things. We did somehow manage to find most of the items listed in this book in conjunction with route 66 specific maps.



5. I have read this book along with reading Route 66: EZ66 Guide for Travelers simultaneously. I find reading them together you get a little more information out of them. We are leaving for our trip in May and will bring both books with us. This book has a wealth of information and very easy to follow. I am very excited to take our trip because of all of the exciting information I have read about. The author has great experience and has driven this route many times. I feel confident we will have a wonderful trip.

5 comments about Tokyo City Atlas: A Bilingual Guide (3rd Ed.).

1. This was the most useful thing I brought to Tokyo. I used it every day I was there, and the bilingual feature came in handy considering many fare charts and train stations don't have the Anglicized spellings of routes/stations prominently displayed.
   
   It was most useful when I found my train line unexpectedly delayed/indefinitely shut-down one evening and had to find my way to the next station to get home. Or when I thought Yoyogi Park looked like a short walk from the top of the Met. Gov't Building and took off on foot, only to get a very interesting route through several wards before finding the park. Even though I was quite off course, the map was accurate, reflected the landmarks (good luck finding a named street), and made getting around easy. I got lost but could always reference the map and find my way home.
   
   My only criticism is that it did not go into much detail beyond central Tokyo and I spent some time in outlying areas. Obviously it's a large city and hard to pack so much into a still-portable book, but something of the suburbs would be nice in future editions.



2. A very handy guide that helped me navigate my way around Tokyo's labyrinth streets. A great deal of work went into this book and it is truly helpful in areas where there isn't an English translation on the signage. Although I have to say, that during my recent trip to Japan, any time I looked down at my directions or map a native would approach me to help me with directions. Even if they couldn't speak a word of English they would work through it to send you off in the right direction. In spite of my good fortune to run into so many helpful people, having the book was my security blanket. I'm buying a copy for a friend who travels to Japan quite often as I'm sure they will find it a lifesaver.



3. Tokyo is incredible but difficult to navigate unless you have an accurate and detailed map. These maps contain all the essentials, even the subway exits. Even after many years living in Tokyo, I never go beyond my neighborhood without this book. I've tried most tourist maps of Tokyo but at best they provide an approximate guide. This book can prevent spending thirty minutes trying to find the correct exit out of Shinjuku station or walking a kilometer out of the way after surfacing at the wrong exit. Major landmarks are also labeled in English so you can remember what it's like to be literate.



4. Is this the best bilingual atlas out there? Probably so. However, at 8.2 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches, it's slim, but extremely wide and tall. This is unfortunate, as it makes it so it does not fit into your pocket or a small purse.
   
   Admittedly it's easier to read, but often times, you're having to open this up in cramped quarters (of which there are plenty in Japan), and it's a lot more convenient to pull this out of a pocket vs a backpack in a congested area. There are several pocketable Tokyo atlases written in Japanese only, and it's a shame they don't have a bilingual edition of those, as it would be a lot easier to carry.
   
   At 5 years old, it's a bit outdated, as a good chunk of the city has changed already. It's a shame that they don't update this at least once every 2 years. Still, a must-buy if you plan on going solo or off the beaten path. If you plan on hanging out with a tour group or locals, it's unlikely that you'll need this.



5. I cannot recommend this atlas more. The level of detail is absolutely necessary in a city where the street number cannot be relied on for a buildings location. Until 1957, address street numbers were assigned in chronologic order, not geographic