Customer Reviews

Europe's Monastery and Convent Guesthouses: A Pilgrim's Travel Guide

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

 

 

Not a well-organized book.

Map of Italy shows no monasteries in Sicily (though there's plenty of room), while map of "Italy South" shows two, one of which, "Gibilmanna" on the map is listed under its real name "Convento Cappuccini" which is a bit difficult to guess. What's the point of a map if you must read the entire text to find a place listed on the map?

There is much useless filler material in this book such as how to get to Sicily by train (repeated verbatim for each monastery in Sicily). There is almost nothing on flights, ships, buses, cars.

We bought several monastery lodging guidebooks for our travels to Europe. Each guidebook was very helpful in its own way. We found this guidebook Europe's Monastery and Convent Guesthouses: A Pilgrim's Travel Guide to be one of our favorite resources, as it was the most updated and had current website addresses and email addresses. In addition, we found some monastery guidebooks to provide good travel information on how to reach each place while others didn't provide this helpful info. However, Europe's Monastery and Convent Guesthouses was one of the better books in providing directions on how to reach each place. We also really liked the "Where to Stay" section, which for us was one of the most useful as it described the acccommodations available at each place. Above all, we also really liked the spiritual and historical aspect of monastery life integrated into this guidebook.

I should have heeded the advice of another reviewer who complained that the book gave no information about prices or where Monasteries were located. (Arrogantly?) I figured I'd be able to locate the Monasteries (I was wrong). The book is useless and I will have to buy another. Seriously, if you buy this book you will regret it.

This guidebook caught my interest since I'm writing a comprehensive guidebook about 100 abbeys, monasteries and retreatcentres in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and German. It will be published in October 2011. Unlike Wright I have visited all (100) locations myself and tried to make each description original and personal, with photos of every visited location. Unfortunately it's only in Dutch, but who knows it will be translated in English some day. Wright's guidebook is useful, but he could have made some more effort. I miss more photos, to get a better idea of each location. This edition is an improvement of the last one, but it could be so much better. Every text begins the same: " Founded in...." I also found a few mistakes in the 8 selected Dutch monasteries. the information on one of them (Paulusabdij) is out of date since the monks have left 5 years ago. He should have known about this, which proves he did his research poorly. If you want to know more about my guidebook, don't hesitate to contact me or check my Dutch website kloostergids dot com.