Lonely Planet USA (Travel Guide)
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Lonely Planet USA (Travel Guide) Paperback – April 1, 2014
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By
K. Polzin
on July 10, 2014
Format: Paperback
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The only way I know to review this book is to look up some towns and cities that I know well and see how well they are covered.
The best thing about this Lonely Planet guide is the succinct descriptions of the locales at the beginning of each entry. If you are trying to decide between different places to visit, these descriptions can give a real feel for the type of place each city/town is.
Sacramento is a city I know well. Its entry starts with a great description that feels pretty spot-on. It then lists five sites, followed by hotels and restaurants. There isn't much else. After the mention in the introduction of "interesting...culture" and an "arts scene" downtown, more details would have been appropriate.
I've been to Philadelphia many times, and its entry is ten times longer (32 columns to Sacramento's three). Both entries list museums and parks, but Philadelphia's includes listings for architecture, outdoor markets, theaters, etc. It's a great city, and it deserves the lengthy coverage, but it does make me think Sacramento got short shrift.
I suppose this is the result of bringing together writing from 24 different travel writers. Most of the entries (I assume) are edited down from longer coverage in area guidebooks. The editors try to give a fair balance, but it isn't perfect.
The best use of this book would be for browsing, to decide which places you might want to visit. You will ultimately want to buy more detailed guides for the areas you decide to go.
The best thing about this Lonely Planet guide is the succinct descriptions of the locales at the beginning of each entry. If you are trying to decide between different places to visit, these descriptions can give a real feel for the type of place each city/town is.
Sacramento is a city I know well. Its entry starts with a great description that feels pretty spot-on. It then lists five sites, followed by hotels and restaurants. There isn't much else. After the mention in the introduction of "interesting...culture" and an "arts scene" downtown, more details would have been appropriate.
I've been to Philadelphia many times, and its entry is ten times longer (32 columns to Sacramento's three). Both entries list museums and parks, but Philadelphia's includes listings for architecture, outdoor markets, theaters, etc. It's a great city, and it deserves the lengthy coverage, but it does make me think Sacramento got short shrift.
I suppose this is the result of bringing together writing from 24 different travel writers. Most of the entries (I assume) are edited down from longer coverage in area guidebooks. The editors try to give a fair balance, but it isn't perfect.
The best use of this book would be for browsing, to decide which places you might want to visit. You will ultimately want to buy more detailed guides for the areas you decide to go.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By
l2
TOP 1000 REVIEWER on June 19, 2014
Format: Paperback
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This is a traditional Lonely Planet book, now in its 8th edition. It gives you broad and even coverage of the whole country in 1200 pages. Obviously, the USA is a large country with interesting things to see and do all over the place, so no portable book is going to have complete coverage of the whole country. This book just gives you the biggest highlights and expects you to fill in the gaps through exploring on your own or from other sources. If you're going to be spending an extended period of time (like one of those 6 week vacations that we hear about Europeans having) and you want to save weight by only carrying one guidebook, then this one is as good as any. To save space, this book has few pictures and small type. It is really more of an outline than a detailed travel guide. Once you hit the highlights in a city or state, you can expand your visit by learning from the locals (or from the Internet). Or you can pick up additional more detailed books along the way and give them away when you leave the city.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By
John L Murphy
TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on July 4, 2014
Format: Paperback
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I spot-checked this for a place I knew well and one I wanted to visit. I've used the Lonely Planet Guidebooks for Ireland, Great Britain (Discover) and Europe (Discover) lately, so I knew the general pattern. Top experiences, regional progression, two-tone pages, good maps, snappy tone, concise references, and a bit on the culture and context, along with travel tips. Sleeping, eating, drinking, getting there and away all are included, as well as a handy map of estimated travel times on all of the big interstates.
For my Californian native perspective, I found the coverage a lively mix of familiar places with, once in a while, a museum I would not have thought to visit or recommend. Even the restaurants have some quirky picks, and they recommend wisely some great places from a variety of price ranges, always a plus, whenever suitable. You get the historic tidbits, if brief in such a large guidebook of 1200 pages. Still, for all its heft, it is a compact size and fits well in two hands as a reference easy to stash away.
However, the map of San Francisco, even if highlight-yellow accentuates streets, left that one of Van Ness absent of its name, and on the state map, some highways had shields indicating the state routes but no numbers! Small mistakes, but still, if one travels, one may need such information, after all. On the other hand, the text may well explain the signs and places. The city maps do have some color for districts and sightseeing grids and the yellow tone does emphasize the usual routes to navigate.Read more ›
For my Californian native perspective, I found the coverage a lively mix of familiar places with, once in a while, a museum I would not have thought to visit or recommend. Even the restaurants have some quirky picks, and they recommend wisely some great places from a variety of price ranges, always a plus, whenever suitable. You get the historic tidbits, if brief in such a large guidebook of 1200 pages. Still, for all its heft, it is a compact size and fits well in two hands as a reference easy to stash away.
However, the map of San Francisco, even if highlight-yellow accentuates streets, left that one of Van Ness absent of its name, and on the state map, some highways had shields indicating the state routes but no numbers! Small mistakes, but still, if one travels, one may need such information, after all. On the other hand, the text may well explain the signs and places. The city maps do have some color for districts and sightseeing grids and the yellow tone does emphasize the usual routes to navigate.Read more ›
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By
L. Wallach
on June 24, 2014
Format: Paperback
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This is a good general-purpose reference for traveling within the US, as you would expect from Lonely Planet. The coverage is pretty vast but not incredibly deep. It mentions many different restaurants, sites, hotels, etc., but doesn't give any of them more than a brief synopsis to get one interested. It's really a guide for those who don't want have the time to research or read in-depth guides of a particular location. While I certainly understand the utility of this, at the same time, I also wonder how useful such a tome will be for most people. Unless you are truly taking a year off to travel around the country, chances are you have a week or two to explore an area or if you're lucky a couple of areas within the country. I say this because inevitably books like this will become dated to various extents after a few years. The part of the country I live in (the DC Metro region) seems to a lot over just a 5-10 year period, let alone a longer one, with tons more development, business closing and new ones opening. Certainly there are many parts of the country where the rate of change is much slower, but still, I would think that after just a few years one might need to buy a more up to date version of this. You simply aren't going to use most of the information in here within that time unless you are retired and traveling across the US!
The book boasts "inspirational images, 3D illustrations" but really the book is so small that it's probably going to be better to view such imagery on a tablet, which will have a larger screen but probably weigh the same or less than this book.Read more ›
The book boasts "inspirational images, 3D illustrations" but really the book is so small that it's probably going to be better to view such imagery on a tablet, which will have a larger screen but probably weigh the same or less than this book.Read more ›
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