Customer Reviews

Frommer's New York City 2010 (Frommer's Color Complete)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Compared to older travel guides that are composed of hundreds of pages of solid text, opening Frommer's Color New York City is like discovering a party -- nearly every two-page spread is livened with a map, color photo, or sidebar. To be clear, it isn't like the lush DK Eyewitness series (which is image-heavy at the expense of information), but rather very much like the Fodor's Full Color Gold series.

It's a complete guide to planning a trip, with sections detailing NYC history, boroughs and neighborhoods; hotels, bars and restaurants (limited to those most evocative of NYC -- readers are referred to the Internet for chains); sites, attractions and shopping; suggested itineraries and getting around; and a pull-out map (waterproof and durable).

While Fodor's seems a little more lush and professional, this Frommer's seems a little more personal and practical -- and, for me, preferable.

Me and my wife had moved to the big apple about two years ago, and own pretty much all of the tour guides on the subject.
As loyal fans of the lonely planet series, we had a really hard time believing that this book will have something new to offer,however, we were pleasantly surprised!
The Book's 486 pages are filled with great up-to-date information including very specific maps and excellent itineraries, for example: new york in 1,2 and 3 days, other boroughs in a day and many more to suit every desire!
this book is very well suited for families and people traveling with children since it offers everything from entertainment and food for families.
The first chapter is the itineraries and the 'top' everythings, and the next few chapters go in depth on how to plan a trip and how to get around in the city. The book continues to describe the neighborhoods, along with suggested itineraries, and finishes off with a list of after dark activities, shopping and a variety of maps.
All in all, a very recommended book, especially for those traveling with children.

Most people by now are probably familiar to Frommers travels guides. When using travel guides for short visits, there are three criteria I think are important for having a useful guide. The first is content, the second is arrangement of content, and the third is visuals.

Frommers have always had great content for people visiting places where they want to see the major sites. If you are going to live in said place, I would recommend something more detailed to local life and less centered around major attractions, but for most vacations, Frommers covers content pretty well with some background/history and good coverage of attractions. You will get some basic descriptions of attractions which should be somewhat adequate for the decision making process. It seems like this new Frommer's 2010 book actually has shorter descriptions then books in the past but perhaps that's because of the new color pictures. Frommer's now have color pictures which are sporadic and ofter at angles that aren't very helpful. They also now have color maps within the content of the book (not just in the included fold out map) which makes using them much easier.

The arrangement of content is actually a really big deal to me. Here are the listings of the chapters:

1. The Best of the Big Apple - numerous best of lists.
2. New York City in Depth - a cursory history of NYC
3. Planning Your Trip to NYC -
4. NYC Neighborhoods and Suggested Itineraries - 1-2 page descriptions of each neighborhood.
5. Where to Stay
6. Where to Dine
7. Exploring NYC
8. Shopping
9. NYC After Dark
10.Fast Facts

Overall pretty good and this book would definitely be adequate. That being said I prefer the DK Eyewitness travel guides because their sections are divided up by area of the city which is a lot more useful when you are planning daily itineraries and improving while out exploring.

I bought a few NY guides before my trip, and didn't know how to proceed with them.
Once on the spot, this one proved to be extremely useful. Very practical, really updated infornation by subjects, by districts, good maps, especially the foldable general map I could take with me in my coat pocket...
I left the others in the hotel room the day I was flying back, and took this one back to Spain with me, just in case.

Frommer's travel guides contain hundreds of color photos, foldout maps, exact prices, directions, and candid reviews of hotels and restaurants, shopping, and nightlife. The guide also contains itineraries, walking tours, trip planning ideas, insider tips from local experts, and many other beneficial tips to get the most out of the location someone is traveling to. Frommer's has an easy to read structure that allows for efficient traveling and smooth navigating, and while it may sometimes be an overload of information, overall, it's well worth the price and will enable the traveler to have an excellent experience in an unfamiliar location.
In the Frommer's guide to New York City, there was a list on page two entitled "Most Unforgettable New York City Experiences," which was a very eye-catching way to start off the guide. Moral of the story; Frommer's doesn't waste any time. Right away they list some great things for first time visitors to partake in, including some smaller things that other guidebooks might miss, like "Take the New York City Subway." That's a no brainer to someone who's been to New York City once or twice. It's something everyone should do, yet something most guides might forget about. The guide also suggests to walk up 125th street (Harlem Boulevard), and run around the Central Park reservoir. (Two other admirable suggestions.) Then of course, the guide lists some of the big, more obvious guns, like visiting the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building. Frommer's Paris will undoubtedly inspire someone to want to visit Paris. In the "Most Unforgettable Paris Experiences" section there are references to Ernest Hemingway's memoir of Paris "A Moveable Feast," and it has a list of a few bars and cafes he enjoyed writing and drinking at, which is something many travelers, not tourists, would be interested in visiting.
A review on the website [..] states that Frommer's guides specialize in European countries. The travel guides taking place in these countries are said to be of higher quality, although not much of a difference in quality could be noticed between New York City and the Paris guide. Both seemed quite similar in structure and style. Granted, they were edited by different people. Perhaps in the past it came down to how well the editors really knew the area in which they were studying.
The guidebook contains very useful pictures on almost every page, along with list after very useful list, including best buildings, restaurants, and things to do for free. Numerous maps are scattered throughout the book, and tucked away in the back is a fold out map of Manhattan. Granted, "New York City" consists of all five boroughs, and Manhattan is simply "The City," but that's something to be forgiven. Someone traveling to New York wouldn't find too much worth outside of Manhattan. It isn't a subway map, but those are all over the city, so it would have been unnecessary. The language of the guide is very simple. For the most part, short, concise sentences are used. For example, on page 90, referring to Union Square, the guide states that "Union Square is the hub of the entire area; the N, Q, R, 4, 5, 6, W, and L train stop here, making it easy to reach from most other city neighborhoods." Within this short introduction to Union Square, a lot is said in simple words; the reader knows of all the trains that run through the square, and the area is defined as a busy, popular place with a lot of activity going on. This use of simple language enables teenagers, as well as older folks, to use this guide with relative ease. The language, as well as the easy-to-use lists and references, is why Frommer's is one of the most popular and bestselling travel guides in the world. One downside is that Frommer's may be more geared for high rollers in the economy department. Although Frommer's does do their best to offer cheap and free things to do, the guide doesn't go too far out of their way to do it, and there are plenty more expensive hotels mentioned than cheap ones. The guide itself runs for about twenty dollars. The smaller sized Boston edition breaks down Hotels into three categories; very expensive, expensive, and moderate. Notice how there is no "Cheap" section. There's always a few cheap hotels to be mentioned, so why not include them? A few teenagers venturing to Boston would most definitely want a cheap hotel that they could just crash in for a few hours each night. Other lists, such as restaurants and bars contain lists labeled as "Inexpensive."
The regular sized Frommer's travel guides for New York City and Paris made very good use of pictures. More than half of the pages in the guide had at least one picture. When discussing architecture, restaurants, or even fun activities, there was usually at least one picture to give the reader an idea of what they were in store for. This creates a picture in the mind of the reader, and the mere aesthetics of the visuals could be enough to draw the reader to want to commit to either buying the book, or listening to the writers advice. The portable Boston guide didn't have any pictures at all, and it definitely was harder to navigate because of it. The pictures help structure and help the reader find things a lot quicker. If the reader wants to find a good restaurant and they see a picture of a restaurant, chances are they've found their section without having to look in the index.
The size of the travel guide is manageable, and reasonably lightweight (weighing just under two pounds). It won't fit in a normal-sized pocket, but a bag or a purse will do, and the weight allows one to carry it around with relative ease. An older crowd would find this The audience may be written for more of an older crowd. It isn't overwhelmingly written for an older crowd, but if there was any lean, it'd be more towards the older crowd. Frommer's has a variety of locations to choose from, including, but not limited to; Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Rome, Chicago, Dublin, London, Las Vegas, and Hong Kong. Typically, Frommer's gears its guides towards specific cities as oppose to generalizing them towards countries, as some other guides occasionally do. The guide is riddled with many interesting sections that the reader would love, including ones such as "Where the Editor eats," which is a list of restaurants that the editor personally writes about and recommends.
There are a few places that Frommer's doesn't seem to cover, such as Australia, Alaska, and other often overlooked locations if someone wants to do some sightseeing or hiking and camping. The purpose of the guide focuses on the overall experience of a city. Frommer's answers the question of how a tourist can get the best overall experience. For Frommer's, this seems to be the main objective; experiencing a city or country as much as possible as fast as possible, and that's something to be admired, because the organization of the guide allows for an easy sense of navigation and direction throughout the destination in order to get as many of these things done as possible.

I have lived in New York since 2006. I find it extremely difficult to read this book. I flip through it, and put it down. It's too large and heavy (1.6 pounds) to carry without a backpack or purse; much of the information is generic and unchanged from the 2007 edition. I recommend the portable edition instead.

Most (80%) of the book is single-paragraph descriptions of hotels, restaurants, and other attractions; mostly free of New-York-only idioms or perspectives that are often found in television shows like "Saturday Night Live" or "30 Rock". For the restaurants that I've visited myself, I'd say that the book's descriptions are accurate.

About 10% of the book describes the "outer boroughs" (Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island). The rest is centered on Manhattan.

The dining maps support only one-way lookups. If you know the name of a restaurant you want, it's easy to find the location. That's not so useful, because each restaurant listing already includes the address with cross streets --- remember, most of Manhattan is a rectangular grid. If you are in a particular sub-neighborhood and you want to know what the book says about the restaurants nearby, the maps are useless: you can find the numbered locations, and then you have to scan the alphabetical list of restaurant names to match the number. Then you have to go to the index to find the page with the restaurant. (It may be on the adjoining pages, but there, the restaurants are grouped by price, which doesn't help find the listing.) At least four restaurants on the Midtown map are not in the restaurant index!

The safety blurb is too general. I would have liked to see a list of areas to avoid. Google "New York crime map".

The pace of change in New York makes it difficult to keep a book like this up to date. I agree with E. B. White, who wrote: "The reader will find certain observations to be no longer true of the city, owing to the passage of time and the swing of the pendulum. ... I feel that it is the reader's, not the author's, duty to bring New York down to date; and I trust it will prove less a duty than a pleasure." (1949) The mention of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" (p. 92), which by late 2009 had acquired a new host, with Conan having started his all-too-brief tenure on "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien"; and the highlighted Tavern on the Green, which entered bankruptcy in 2009 and liquidation in 2010, only heightens the reader's awareness of vicissitudes.

I think the editors and writers have exercised great restraint by limiting the exposition to essential, practical information. If I were to have tried to write this book, the size would have doubled with meaningless trivia. Unfortunately, sometimes the descriptions can become too general or telegraphic, and the reader is expected to already know what the writer means. In the neighborhood descriptions, the paragraph introducing "The Flatiron District, Union Square & Gramercy Park" reads:

"These adjoining and at places overlapping neighborhoods are some of the city's most appealing. Their streets have been rediscovered by New Yorkers and visitors alike, largely thanks to the boom-to-bust dot-com revolution of the late 1990s; the Flatiron District served as its geographical heart and earned the nickname 'Silicon Alley' in the process. These neighborhoods boast great shopping and dining opportunities and a central-to-everything location that's hard to beat. A number of impressive new hotels have been added to the mix over the last few years. The commercial spaces are often large, loftlike expanses with witty designs and graceful columns."

I fail to see how this might convey useful meaning to anyone.

It's almost impossible to summarize a city like New York in only 486 pages. With this in mind, I think that this Frommer's guide does as well as any. I've owned 4 or 5 guides to NYC and this is the best one of the lot. I like the "Best of New York" section, and the sections on history and exploring the city are excellent.

I'm a stickler for good, easy to read maps, and these maps pass the test. There is a detachable folded map which for its size contains a lot of information clearly, but you'll need a different map for subway information.

I'm not clear on what the difference is in content between this guide and the Frommers "Gold Guides"-- dates and prices are the same but the Gold Guide has 50 more pages.

I am in New York City at the moment and have used the book all week. The map in the back is a tear-out and is sturdy enough to survive rainy days, and has kept me on track all week. The book is too large to carry all day, but we tear out the sections we need and it works well.

can't say enough great things about this book, you will find all of the info you need and want!

I live about an hour away from NYC so I've been there many times for day trips. But I still need a guidebook - otherwise I keep on going to the same places that I know already. I love to browse through this book and plan a day in the city. If I have to go in for something else, I use it to find other things in the area. So well-organized, all the essential info about a place is there, but in a conversational tone. All the maps that you need are there and easy to view, no odd folding and unfolding. This guidebook is bigger than another one I own but has so much more info. It is still a handy portable size, just thicker. It is probably the best NYC book because it is both comprehensive and small enough to carry around in your bag.