Insight GuidesCritiques

Printed made Birthday card From Knut Steiner to his dad, a postcard and one other tour info paper

Even though from 2016, Insight Guides little travel book on St. Lucia was a valuable tool to use for experiencing St. Lucia.

Many colour illustrations The free app advertised on the front cover may have worked in 2018, when the book was published, but I'm not alone in finding that it now doesn't.

Best for:
People who like more narrative and fewer details in their guidebooks.

In a nutshell:
Broken down by neighborhood, this guide provides narratives but not loads of details on places to see.

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
We are traveling to Glasgow later this month and sadly I could find no full-size proper travel books on the city - only pocket guides.

Review:
This is the first of two pocket-sized guides of Glasgow I’ll be reviewing. I started with this one because until I read the second, I thought this one was fine, so I guess the big take-away for me is to get at least a couple of different guides when traveling so we can compare and take the best away from them.

Like most travel books, this one is broken down by area, but it doesn’t give a great sense of where things are in relation to the city center. It’s also a long narrative with some items bolded, which isn’t how I can best process and grasp information. I did circle and start different attractions, but mentally I’m just not entirely sure where they all are and how they relate to each other.

However, I will be keeping this book, as I’m sure there’s good information in here, including a fairly robust ‘travel tips’ section that will likely come in handy.

Recommend to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep until our trip is over, then donate it.

Nepal

Argentinië

Vancouver

Montreal

Toronto

A useful phrase book; good for review, though not great for lessons.

Useful information for travelers in Arizona, New Mexico, and southern Utah.

Well I went to Barcelona and used this book before and during the trip, I found it quite useful for planning, not so much for going around the city.

The book is well illustrated and has a lot of historical information. The discussions are categorized by the sections of Venice. I learned a lot of information about places that I will never visit. There are some other helpful sections on travel. I recommend the book but like Rick Steve's books better because of the added humor and practical advice including highlights for short visits.

This useful guide to Milan comes with a separate and very useful street map that slips in to the back of the book. The guide also has a free ebook. The guide covers all the usual information you would expect, including walking tours, top tips, places to eat and shop and a brief history. Perfect for a few days in this beautiful city.

14th Edition

shelved at: 92 DUB : Architecture Dubai

shelved at: 92 OMA : Architecture - Qatar

shelved at: 92 DUB : Architecture Dubai

shelved at: 92 OMA : Architecture - Qatar

The world is a fairly large place, though it conveniently fits within the pages of books. Some information will be out-dated, since it's an ever changing thing, though the majority will always remain constant.

A travel guide, no more, no less. More detailed and less patronizing than many. I bought it mostly to get the tourist's-eye view of the island of my ancestry.

This book presents a series of walking tours that you can take while in Melbourne. It offers color photographs and brief descriptions of the places listed on each tour.

Some It's a little hard to search for descriptions of specific sites, though since it's set up by walking tour, rather than being alphabetical by region. Also it focuses rather heavily on architecture and shopping as focal point, which is fine, but I'm not a big fan of shopping and ended up only skimming those sections. I would have preferred more of the local museums and such.

I used it as a general guide to come up with my own itinerary while I was in Melbourne and it worked well for me, helping me to focus in on one small suburb at a time (which is important since Melbourne is HUGE). I used the maps to help me get around, so it definitely helped me during my trip. I also appreciated that it was a slim book and fairly lightweight. Not a bad way to go, if you only going to be visiting the one city.½

The beautiful colour photos glossy sheets make this guide seem attractive at first. But I was taken aback by some of its racist comments. Take, for example, these quotes on page 292: 'many thousands flooding into the hills and burrows to escape the terrifyingly relentless sword of Islam' and 'Astonishingly, Islam proved rather more open to religious freedom than Christianity'.

This book is also probably better used to plan a trip to Turkey than as a guide. While there is a lot of historical and cultural background at the start of the book, individual places are not always covered in much detail and some (e.g. the valleys of Cappadoccia) none at all. Pretty heavy to lug around with you too.½

It is difficult to view Insight Guides generally as the ideal travelling companions; one needs to travel with something more detailed to visit an unusual place like Sardinia properly, (and Insight's rather poor indexing does not help). Even so, this guide, like others in the series, does provide a great deal of essential background information about the culture and unique sights of the island. If the result is something which could appear to be neither fish nor fowl, it has to be said that the wildness and sense of a place apart that pervades Sardinia is something difficult to convey in a guide. Nuraghi, perhaps, are the most obvious manifestation of this, (unless you have a recording or Sardinian music), but examples of the other enigmatic sights - domus de janas, tombe di giganti, well temples and the like - are frequently difficult to reach. This is also true of some of the Pisan Romanesque churches which are as much a part of the place but in such contrast to the prehistory. All of this is perfectly adequately described and illustrated by the Insight Guide. Perhaps if one reads this as background before or after a visit and uses something with more detail to actually find one's way around the sights of Sardinia, one has the best compromise.

Spectacular color photography, as expected from Insight, but also useful background information--history, natural history, the Maori, etc.