DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Great Britain
DK Eyewitness Travel’s full-color guidebooks to hundreds of destinations around the world truly show you what others only tell you. They have become renowned for their visual excellence, which includes unparalleled photography, 3-D mapping, and specially commissioned cutaway illustrations. DK Eyewitness Travel Guides are the only guides that work equally well for inspiration, as a planning tool, a practical resource while traveling, and a keepsake following any trip.You’d be hard-pressed to find
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Doulos
Great Travel Guide, Beautiful Coffee Table Book!,
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Summary:
Every Dorling Kindersley Guide has been a great and interesting book… and delightful to have and use, even if you are not traveling to that location, but are only interested in learning more!
The Guides are well organized in a logical and easy to follow manner. They are beautifully illustrated, well developed with accurate information (it is unusual for hotel and restaurant information to be that accurate), have enough history to help the reader understand the people and cultural background, and have a lot of useful travel information and useable maps in the appendixes.
But, the really great attraction to this book is several fold; it is:
…………Very complete
…………Easy to read
…………Beautifully and artistically completed
…………Good shopping, safety and other tips
…………Gorgeous photographs too numerous to list.
Summary Negative:
The country books are too general to really satisfy all your needs in any given location. So, if your entire trip is spent in Wessex, for example, you will also want to get the specific guide for that city (but, the London Section is fairly good)
Guide Specifics:
The guides are organized as follows:
How to use this guide
Introduction to Great Britain
…………Portrait of Great Britain
…………History of Great Britain
…………Great Britain Through the Year
London, Area by Area
Great Britain by Region
…………Southeast England
……………………Specific Cities / Towns
…………West Country
……………………Specific Cities / Towns
…………Midlands
……………………Specific Cities / Towns
…………North Country
……………………Specific Cities / Towns
…………Wales
……………………Specific Cities / Towns
…………Scotland
……………………Specific Cities / Towns
Travelers Needs
…………Hotels
…………Restaurants
…………Shopping
Survival Information
…………Practical Info.
……………………Police, safety, buses, trains, etc.
…………Travel Info.
……………………Maps, tours, currency, etc.
…………General Index
…………Phrase Book
Discussion:
The book begins with “A Portrait of Great Britain”, including a complete map, a review of Great Britain, it’s history, and Great Britain’s History (very interesting), and Great Britain though the Year – including events, etc.,
Region with an “At a glance” overview, then has subsections of Cities / Towns, then specific locations, churches, historical monuments, bridges, galleries, etc.
Architectural reviews include various views, and cutaways; given greater understanding and better perspective. They are all attractive, if not works of art – honestly.
The travelers’ Info. offers good and valid info. on prices, currencies, customs, important words, etc. I used the reviews on resorts, hotel’s restaurants and nightclubs, etc. and found they were useful and accurate, and helpful with my touring and site decisions
The books are so well thought out that it has multiple maps, with various lookup tables, and the book’s flaps are designed to be used as bookmarks for map pages.
Negative:
The country-wide guides are by definition more general than the specific city guides. So, if you are going to Scotland, get the specific “Scotland” guide (another great guide). If you decide to get the “Great Britain” guide for your 3, or 4 city tour of England, understand that this guide may be a little to general for all your local travel needs.
Conclusion:
As the President, CEO of an International Meeting Planning Corporation we have many resources and techniques to learn about places we have meetings / groups at as well as the cities and sights. But, as a traveler, this book really is top notch and I would recommend it to anyone going on a personal trip, or wanting to learn about a city, or location.
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|Richard R. Carlton
You’re going to LOVE BRITAIN!,
I’ve spent a year in England and have made >30 visits all together.[…]
Eyewitness Travel Guides
Eyewitness is appropriately named as each book provides spectacular 3d aerial angled views of the primary tourists sections. The accompanying information has the full color photos everyone seems to want but what is great about these guides is that they do a fairly good job of providing details about sites, odd stories to perk your interest, and little known things to give you a decent background. The history timelines are visually interesting and do a lot for American perspectives as it helps us a lot to see the full spread of the centuries in order to understand where the sites we are seeing fit into the multi-millenneal scope of things. These are justifiably the best selling travel books for Americans.
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|Keith Monahan
Nice pictures but not organized and not enough content,
When I bought this book at a local bookstore to prepare for an upcoming trip to Great Britain — it looked like the perfect book. Nice bright glossy photos made it interesting to flip though, and get good ideas of where and what to see.
However, I’m now in the planning stages of my trip and find the book is falling short. It is organized by MAJOR area, but the smaller areas aren’t labelled well and are hard to find. And then, for the most part, both restaurants and hotels AREN’T in the section that covers a small area, they are jammed in the back like an afterthought. This means if you are planning to stay in one area, you cant look to see where to stay without flipping to the back. There are simple 1/2 line descriptions, with an address/phone number, and a ballpark price. Outside of looking at price, there is very little indication that says, “hey this is a luxury hotel” or “that hotel is overpriced” or “watch out, there is no air conditioning in that hotel”
The book does have nice pictures which is important, I find myself saying, “Hey, Id like to go to see that!” So for getting ideas on where to visit, it’s good. It also has some helpful travel advice on what to do and what to pack, etc It includes pictures of local food, which is good so you know what you might run into.
Although I’ll probably bring this book with me on vacation, there simply isn’t enough information to decide where to stay and where to eat — and the information that IS there isn’t organzied properly.
I used a Frommer’s guide last year for London and for Ireland, and it was incredibly helpful for planning that trip. I recently bought a Frommer’s England 2000 guide which is organized much better — but only covers England so I’ll have to buy Frommer’s Scotland 2000 too — but I’ll have the information I need.
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