Paris

Let me start by saying I own at least a dozen (if not more) Michelin Green Guides. This was a real let down. The organization was terrible. For example, the book is supposed to be in alphabetical order but some places are listed under their own name i.e. Louvre and others are listed under their location - NOT ARONDISSMENT- i.e. St. Germain. This makes it extremely confusing to figure out where to find the monument, museum, etc. that you're trying to visit.

Also, the index at the back is completely useless. Some places are entered in French alphabetical order and some in English. A lot of places don't even appear in the index at all. This is especially annoying since the main section of the book is so disorganized.

I guess this is really a 3 star book when you compare it to others but it really doesn't live up to Michelin standards. I will still buy other versions for other locations but I suggest you skip this one.

This book covers the sites (not restaurants or hotels - they are in a different book) of every neighborhood of Paris in extraordinary depth. It is an indispensible tool for visiting the city.

The shortcoming of the book is that it provides little assistance in planning and prioritizing your trip. If you are looking for sites in a particular neighborhood, or know what you want to see - this guide will get you there and give you the background information you need.

Like an encyclopedia - it has a lot of information, but you have to know what you are looking for to make it useful. A perfect complement to the Green Guide is a book like Rick Steve's Paris 2001 - which helps in organizing and prioritizing your trip, but covers only the most popular sites in the city.

The Michelin Paris Green Guide is the Cadillac of the Paris travel guides - I wouldn't recommend visiting Paris without it, no matter how well you may think you know the city. Michelin has been around for so long, and is so closely tied to the French culture, you can't go wrong with their recommendations. This is the only travel publication that really gets a traveller into the spirit of Paris. The Michelin 3-star ratings are trusted worldwide, and there's a reason why. I've never been disappointed with a Michelin recommended establishment. Travelling in Europe can be very intimidating, especially when you don't speak the language, but the 3-star ratings made it possible for us to prioritize our outings. The Paris Green Guide made me feel like an insider. The detailed maps include recommended walking tours - a great way to see the sights up close without getting lost! The color photos are beautifully arranged, but the real advantage of this book is that it offers substance over "fluff" - something sadly lacking in many travel books. The great Paris sights are all arranged in alphabetical order, and once you know the name of the sight you'd like to read about, it's right at your fingertips. The detailed information provided for each sight allows you to read as much or as little as you'd like about your destination. This works well for us because my husband is a real history buff and likes all the details in advance, while I prefer to have more of an overview of what I'm about to see, and then I like to go back and get the details after I've seen the sight. The small area maps are also a great feature - we particularly appreciated the museum maps. You can truly get lost in the Louvre, but as long as we had the Green Guide in our bag, we knew we wouldn't miss the highlights we really wanted to see. For practical information (time changes, weather patterns, currency exchange, etc.), the Green Guide offers a special quick reference section in the back of the book. I would highly recommend the Paris Green Guide to anyone visiting Paris - whether it's your first time or you're a seasoned pro - you will appreciate the expertise offered in this first class travel book.

As a devotee of Michelin Guides Vert, in anticipation of our forthcoming trip to Normandy and Brittany I was delighted to find listed on Amazon.com "Michelin THE GREEN GUIDE - Northern France and the Paris Region". On its arrival today I was disappointed to find that neither of our destination Departments was included - only "Nord - Pas de Calais", "Picardie", and "Ile de France - Paris". For what it covers, I presume that this volume meets Michelin's usual high standard. However, either Michelin or Amazon should have indicated what areas "Northern France" includes in this instance, if only by posting the small map of France highlighting the covered departments, that appears on the back cover of the volume. Also, the coverage of the city of Paris is only 7 pages plus a two page map. Thus, those anticipating a substantial coverage of Paris may be disappointed.

Unlike the previous reviewer, I was looking for coverage of Picardie (not Normandie or Bretagne or Paris, which are covered in separate Michelin guides), so this guide was perfect.

The guide covers Picardie, Nord Pas de Calais/French Flanders and the Ile de France. The coverage is exactly what one would expect from Michelin's intelligent, historical and comprehensive reviewing. I thought that the inclusion of coverage of the Ile de France was properly placed, and Michelin affords it detailed attention, as opposed to being treated as sidetrips from Paris.

Therefore, the guide is excellent for both Northern France and the Ile de France.

The 4th edition is quite a change from past green guides. It is much longer and includes limited hotel and restaurant listings as well as useful website addresses. It provides detailed information on architecture, art, beaches, numerous chateaux, nature reserves, walking tours etc for Flanders, Picardy etc. It is a great guide, especially if you have a car, as it provides a number of suggestions for driving tours. If you want a guide for the city of Paris it is probably better to get a guide that concentrates just on that city. However, if you want a guide for Pas-de-Calais towns and the greater Paris region (Versailles, Chartres, Fontainebleau) this one is a very good choice.

Titles can be misleading. In this instance, I was looking for a book that had kid-tested items to see, hike, and do on a park-by-park basis. What is included in this book are an introductory section on what is available for kids in most national parks on a nation wide basis, and individual chapters on each park with lots of non-kid generic information with, at best, a paragraph vaguely related to kid stuff.

This book was exactly what i was looking for as a planned a summer vacation with my kids to a couple of National Parks. It helped emensly and my kids were surpised at how much cool stuff we found to do on the trip because of this book, they were expecting a borking trip where all they did was ride around in the back of the van, but got much more. Thanks alot for writting this book, hopefully soon ill have a use for your Carribean with kids book!!

I bought this book for the family vacation that we are planning for the summer. We found it very helpful for the kids! This book has a great variety of things to do for the whole family. I'd recommend it to any family! I've found that any book by Paris Permenter and John Bigley is very helpful for planning vacations. (We used their Caribbean With Kids book for last summer's vacation!)

The photographs by John Bigelow Taylor are wonderful, but this book has a paucity of explanatory text. I don't just like to look at pretty pictures. I want to know about the jewelry. Who made it? How was it made? Who wears it? How is it worn? Why was it worn? What is the human history behind it? I particularly want to know all this about ethnic jewelry. You won't get it here.

No people are shown wearing the jewelry, so the book is sterile. There is no cultural context. It's a lot to pay for no additional knowledge about ethnic jewelry.

This is, indeed, a very beautifully photographed book. The represented pieces are all exquisite.

Though, it's true there could have been more background information provided, giving the book a rating of one star, as the previous reviewer did, is grossly unjust - an act of spite rather than of informed criticism. Clearly, the book was never meant to be a exhaustive examination of all the ethnological aspects of each piece (though there is ample annotation); such a book would have run to 2000 pages rather than 250! So the Splendor of Ethnic Jewelry is not a doctoral thesis but rather a stroll thru a museum; in this case, the Ghysels Collection. A coffee-table book if you want, but beautiful none the less and of the highest standard.

If you have previously had no interest in ethnic jewelry per se, this book will open your eyes to the extraordinary artistry of these ornaments created by the world's non-industrial peoples. Each object in itself says much more than an accompanying treatise ever could, and I cannot imagine anyone coming away from this book without a desire to learn more.

A second copy purchased for a friend who deals in ethnic jewelry was very much appreciated.

This is a HUGE book filled with georgeous close-ups of really inspirational jewelry. A favorite of mine!

Granted, this may be the most extensive collection of Atget's Paris work in one volume, but the quality of the photographic reproductions leaves a lot to be desired. Although not as exhaustive, Andreas Krase's "Atget's Paris" contains beautiful, high- quality reproductions of a large number of Atget's Paris photos. The Krase book also contains a very well written and informative essay on Atget's personal history and work. For true Atget junkies, you may want to own both; but if you can only have one, or if you want the one that best "transports" you into Atget's paris, go for the Krase book. ...and finally for real buffs of old Paris photos (especially pre-Hausmannization), you may try to seek out the work of the photographer Marville (good luck, unfortunately it seems his stuff is out-of-print at present), or the Panaromanic Photograph collection in the "American Memory" collection of the Library of Congress...

This book is perhaps one of the most wonderful collections of photographs that I have ever had the pleasure of owning. Eugène Atget, a failed actor, painter, sailor, and soldier, eventually settled on photography as a career some thirty-odd years into his life, and set out to make a photographic record of the whole of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1920, some 4,000 negatives existed, from which many have been culled for the present volume.

Of course, as cities, go, Paris, like London or Rome, has perhaps more than its share of photogenic sites. However, oddly enough, considering that these photos are more than three quarters of a century old, no book has ever reproduced the experience of Paris more to my taste than this collection of Atget's work. Organised by arrondissement (the subsections into which the whole of Paris is divided), the book offers a systematic voyage past landmarks familiar and unfamiliar. Images of the Jardin des Tuilleries, Notre Dame, the Palais du Louvre, the Champs-Elysées and so many other familiar names and places are here. Faces of long-dead Parisians stare out from streets now populated by their descendants. It is as though the very images, bathed in light now a century gone, come to life in these photos. All the majesty and squalor, the beauty and degradation of a great city; these things are all captured by Atget's lens. The effect is moving and eerie, and suits what is arguably the Continent's greatest city down to the ground.

And, on a strictly personal note, one of my favourite photos is taken from the 17th Arrondissement, in the Quartier des Ternes. It is of a café in the Avenue de la Grande-Armée, dated 1924 or 1925, empty chairs and tables bathed in sunlight, and an advert for Bass Extra Stout painted on the window! Truly a sublime moment.

Do yourself a favour, if you enjoy old photographs or love Paris, or both. Find a copy of this book, and enjoy it on those days when you can't actually be there.

Although the reviews of the restaurants are overall on the target, this guide has a MAJOR flaw -- it is not updated very frequently. This edition, for instance, was last modified back in 1997. Many of its recommendations have moved, closed down, or changed business hours. Another problem is that the book does not make it easy to find any of the restaurants. For some reason, the names of the (allegedly) nearest metro stop are given for the shops, but not for the restaurants. The bottom line is: I don't recommend using this book as your primary source.

Gayot's Paris offers a French perspective on the City of Light. Most French people I know consider the Gualt-Millau guides the most accurate and up-to-date availabe - notwithstanding Michelin. GM says their guides "...distinguish the truly superlative from the merely overrated" - an extremely useful service in my experience. The restaurant and hotel listings are concise and dead accurate and the shopping notes are great too. Nightlife and sightseeing are very well covered and the critical appraisals of places and sights is particularly helpful. This is a very useful book for the selective traveler, and was especially helpful in sorting-through the mind-numbingly endless possibilities Paris offers.

I was disappointed in this book although Michael Sadler has an impressive knowledge of France, French and the French and parts of the book are undoubtedly funny. Still, I felt the humor was too deliberate and over-the-top for my taste, not to mention a bit on the crude side. A heartfelt francophile, Mr. Sadler tracks a year-long sabbatical spent in Paris with the primary focuses of the book being his quest to bed a married Frenchwoman and his association with a neighborhood group of men who hang out at the local bar and periodically indulge in semi-clandestine meals consisting of unusual French dishes (pig ears, bull testicles, etc.). If the story about the married woman is to be believed as truth, there's an uncomfortable amount of kiss-and-tell, meant-to-be funny detail of their "courtship" and one 23-minute sexual encounter. The book also contains much extensive descriptions of food and drink and, unfortunately, the negative physical ramifications of his over-indulgences for the author. Much of the book is in or references French and, although he explains the majority of it, I doubt that I would have followed it all if I hadn't been living in Paris for some years myself. Not that it detracts, but the perspective is definitely British, not American, so some minor references might not mean much to an American.

Expat Brit Peter Mayle has written several delightfully witty books (A YEAR IN PROVENCE, TOUJOURS PROVENCE, ENCORE PROVENCE) describing his long residence in Provence in an old farm house that he and his wife fixed up. Peter contributes the preface to AN ENGLISHMAN IN PARIS written by lunch-buddy and fellow countryman Michael Sadler.

According to the book's back flap, Sadler now lives in Paris and Touraine with his French wife and their daughter. There's no time frame to AN ENGLISHMAN IN PARIS, but I gather that it recalls Michael's experience as a younger and still-single man during his first extended trip to Paris from his home in England.

Sadler's narrative contains some decidedly humorous moments, as when he transports a large wheel of odiferous cheese from point A to B. Or when he makes his first tremulous journey through that chaotic maelstrom of traffic known as the Place de l'Etoile. And when he must transfer his belongings from temporary hotel lodgings to a new apartment, and there's nowhere to park in front of the latter. Or his culinary introduction to such delicacies as beef testicles and pigs ears. Then there's his giddy affair with a married French woman.

Compared to Peter's volumes, however, Sadler isn't quite so relaxed. Perhaps it's the abundant energy and hormones of a younger man. At times, Michael's activities seem positively frenetic. Moreover, he introduces into the text many French phrases and sentences, the translations of which aren't always readily apparent as you read them, if at all. To be fair, there is a 5-page glossary of terms and colloquial expressions at the end. Language aside, chapter 28 is entirely incoherent (by design, I assume) - as if he was writing under the influence of some cooking sauce made with hallucinogenic mushrooms.

AN ENGLISHMAN IN PARIS is short - only 193 pages in a small hardcover format. Reading the book doesn't require a large investment of time. But, if you want something more satisfying about life as a foreigner in France, go first with Mayle.

I am a great admierer of the french symbolists, but not when translated by Mr. Crosby. According to the biographical information in the back of the book, Mr. Crosby is qualified to translate the works of Baudelaire because as a medical doctor, his area of experise is the spleen. His experiecne with french, he claimed, came mostly from 2 years of High School study. Theoreticaly this makes me more qualified than he is to translate the works of Baudelaire.

All this you can see in the great liberties he takes with the text, and the innacurate representations he puts forth in many cases.

Aparently, this is all just a hobby for him.

At any rate, I would recomend finding a scholarly translation if you are interested in the real voice of Baudelaire.

Dr. Crosby has done the impossible. He has translated Baudelaire while somehow maintaining the sound, the music of the great man. For those seeking a word-for-word transliteration (for example the semi-literate Austin Kramer (see above)) look elsewhere. For those who wish to know the soul and sound of CB this is your book!!!

I could not relate to any of the characters in this story, and felt no sympathy for them. Espinosa's characters managed to infuriate me with their poor life choices and apparent idiocy, not to mention the complete lack of any morality. Perhaps if the reader had been given a better history and/or descriptions of Rosa's childhood, her actions could be better understood. Her background development was sketchy at best.

Very well-done character study which chronicles the partnership and evolution of two people from different cultures. Rosa's turmoil, gradual independence and developmental realizations are painful and ultimately relieving to witness. Just when the reader has developed an escalating repulsion for Antonio for his acts of violence and abuse, a very subtle and complex shift occurs as his humanity emerges, so that by the end of the book compassion for the struggles we all grow through provides material for consideration. The other characters, particularly Rosa's mother and father, are complicated as well, evoking conflicting feelings that force the reader to reexamine preconceptions. The backdrop of France, the east coast and the San Francisco Bay Area provides an interesting palette upon which the characters' lives are played out, and anyone who has lived in these regions will appreciate the cultural authenticity presented. Overall, a very human story and emotionally provocative experience.

This is one of the best psychological fiction novels I have ever read. The character development is not static- the personalities of the characters unfold and change in the course of the novel, which is not common in most fiction. This book is highly complicated, and may offend some individuals. If you like Paul Auster- read this book.

This is one of my least favorite Maigret novels; the characterizations are peculiarly inept here, and the plot is just plain silly. There are far better Maigret books though, just don't start with this one!

I see two reviews here, and they're completely opposite each other! I read this book, my first and only Maigret, and I thought I was enjoying it, but correct me if I misread -- didn't the solution to the crime pop up in the final pages in the form of someone we hadn't even known existed?! That threw me completely. I read it again a few years later and could have sworn the same thing happened (that I hadn't missed a clue earlier in the book). I want to like the Maigret books, but are they all like that?

If you're curious about Simenon's unique style and his great character Maigret, this is the one to start with. More than any of the other 50 Maigrets I've read, this one epitomizes the qualities that make these books so remarkable; Maigret solves crimes, like this one, not so much by the regular procedure of detection, but by trying to understand the circumstances of the crime and the lives of the people involved. In this book, the crime becomes almost irrelevant compared to the study of character and human unhappiness.