Customer Reviews

Blue Guide Istanbul, Fifth Edition (Blue Guides)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

We used this book on our trip to Istanbul last week, and it was I was intimidated at first by all the historic detail, but I found this book better than any guide you could hire to navigate through millenia of history on the shores of the Bosphorus. It walks you through the sites, and gives the historic context for each. Very informative.

It has a nice list of sites not to be missed in the front, in case your trip is brief, as was ours.

I will always travel with this brand of book in the future. They recruit actual scholars of the area to do much of the writing.

This is the detailed guide for someone with a fairly long stay in Istanbul and a serious interest in art and history. Compared with the Lonely Planet Istanbul it's not as readable and has less practical "how to get there" and "where to stay" information but it's usful once you're in a particular building and want to know more about it. Sometimes it tells you more than you want to know but it seldom tells less.

In general, one can trust the Blue Guide series to be accurate, precise and informative; this guide to Istanbul, one the other hand, is a disgrace to the series: I have just returned from a short trip having noted over twenty mistakes (about two a day!). These mistakes range from incorrect phone numbers for hotel and restaurants (at least three, but still excusable) to missing hotels, to unscholarly, opinionated blather about how Turks are choosing to develop their city (utterly inexcusable from an author with Freely's scholarly pretensions). In short, avoid this book!

This book has not yet been shipped to me three months after I ordered it, and I trust I have not yet been charged for it, either. But if Amazon wants a review, they have it here.