Rough Guide New York City 9e [Paperback]

I can't imagine how anyone purchases a tour book on-line (I have to browse at a physical store and then come here to buy!), but here are a couple of things I noticed:

1. This guide, while it advises travelers to use the subway, does not provide suggested stops for individual attractions. The exception is in the museum section. As a result, I had to walk around always having this book and a subway map on hand, with my companion and I shuffling through the two to figure out which stops lined up with which street addresses the best.

2. The restaurant section was not very helpful because of its organization. I would have preferred to have restaurants listed with things they are near in the neighborhood sections. For example, most of our days were organized by going to the things as listed in a neighborhood section of the book, but when we wanted to know what to eat, we had to stop and find the appropriate section way in the back of the book under restaurants and then cuisine headings.

3. As the editors suggest in the introduction, this book does a great job of suggesting bargain options for getting to, getting around, and getting entertained in New York City, but it still presents other options as well. People who like to travel on a budget but also like to splurge every now and then will be well-informed on both fronts.

4. The authors do a wonderful job of providing background information about sites listed in the book, which we found to increase our appreciation of places visited greatly. It also made it easier to decide ahead of time which places we wanted to see and which we could do without.

This is a great guide, but be sure you find a tour book that fits your style, especially for a city as daunting as New York.

On the plus side, I was pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the restaurant recommendations (though I did not have the opportunity of staying at any hotels this time) and I liked the organization of the beginning as a neighborhood-by-neighborhood tour of New York. Many guides are so Manhattan-centric as to leave a false impression of the Big Apple: This one was remarkably even-handed throughout.

Curiously, the main problem was that, at times, the authors did not know whether to describe a particular tourist sight in terms of the neighborhood chapter or in terms of the museums chapter. At times, such as in the description of the Fraunces Tavern, one is sent scurrying between chapters. Other than this, I felt that this guide deserved five stars.

The numerous black and white maps are of high quality, and the index is particularly useful given the book's organization. This one's a winner.