Customer Reviews

India Handbook, 17th: Travel guide to India with unparralleled coverage of the region (Footprint India Handbook)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
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What do we want in travel guides? I believe we want accuracy and a balance between context (history, literature, architecture, culture, etc...) and pragmatics (timetables, addresses, prices, etc...). This guide to India is the best of the lot, conforming to my simple formula.

It's nice and thick, to give the cultural traveler enough to contemplate, but it's also portable and durable, to fit the needs of the frustrated backpacker. Footprint has been at India for a long time (this is the 18th edition!), so you can expect a well-refined and useful product, not to mention an enjoyable armchair read. The book is as useful in the Indian countryside as in the cities. It's really THAT comprehensive, and it includes detailed chapters on Kashmir and other Himalayan provinces.

Don't buy this book looking for pretty color photographs or graphics. You'll need your mind to create those. And when you go to India, you'll get to test you visual imagery against reality. It's really quite exhilarating!

As a fan of Rough Guides, this is one of the few that I will recommend ABOVE that excellent series.

If you haven't been to glorious India, buy this book and go... alone if necessary. I've been four times, always with this book. It has NEVER let me down.

I echo the sentiments of the previous reviewers. I've spent 12 weeks in India over two trips and I've used the Lonely Planet, the Rough Guide and the Footprints. If I could only take one guide, it would be Footprints because it's the most concise and well-researched of the three (my second choice would be the Rough Guide; I like LP, but feel that their India guide isn't very well updated). So buy the Footprints and get thee to the India Mike website, which is the best travel website ever. Ask an impossible question and you'll get an answer (or 10), usually within a few hours.

Though I have not yet seen the 17th edition of Footprint's India handbook, I have read the 15th and 16th ("India Handbook 2009") editions, taking the latter with me during a recent trip in the Subcontinent. I found Footprint's guide vastly superior to its competitors, the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide publications.

The Footprint guide gives considerably more background on the history and culture of India than the Lonely Planet, and a bit more than the Rough Guide. If you are a traveler keen on understanding the people instead of merely seeing monuments and buying souvenirs, then you'll find Footprint's supplementary information to be of great help. Footprint also spurs the traveler on to tackling some challenges on his own, as interesting sites outside the beaten tourist path are occasionally mentioned without the exact steps necessary to get there. In comparison, the Lonely Planet especially seems like it is meant to hold a timid traveler's hand.

Footprint's guides use a rather different organizational scheme than other guidebooks, dividing each province into zones and listing all accomodation, restaurants and transportation options for each city in the zone at the end of the zone section instead of at the end of the city entry. This can take some getting used to. The only real complaint I have is that Footprint has clearly not been updating its listings much from edition to edition. The 15th and 16th guides are basically identical even as prices rise and some once-venerable guesthouses become dilapidated. I don't use listings, taking a guidebook along only for the maps and the walking tours, but readers who depend on them might not be getting the best info.

While I am unable to compare this guide to other guides, I can say I used the guide through numerous sites/cities/states in India and enjoyed myself immensely. I was happy to discover that the guide includes maps to many of the sites I visited thus saving me from hiring a guide. Usually the book would make recommendations as to when to hire a guide and also when to prepare oneself for the chorus of "madam! madam!" of the hawkers. The reading regarding the monuments was very helpful and interesting beforehand and on the site. The descriptions of the different religions, cultures, behaviors was very informative and I could have done with reading more before in preparation as opposed to after in curiosity. The book itself is extremely durable and surprisingly lightweight for a hardcover. I did notice some of the prices listed were lower than the actual so I would purchase the updated edition if you are able. Overall I have been very happy with my purchase.