Customer Reviews

Let's Go 2000: New York City: The World's Bestselling Budget Travel Series (Let's Go. New York City)

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The Let's Go NYC guide is intended for the backpack traveler on a seriously cramped budget. The guides are heavily marketed in Europe, where the tradition of young folks backpacking around the world for a year is strong. For this reason, much of this guide focuses on how to eat, sleep, and get into museums and cultural attractions for cheap or free; and what to do, say, or think about when you get there. Also, great attention is paid to things like hospital locations, public transport systems, police phone numbers, etc. - things you may not plan for in advance, but are very grateful for when you end up wanting them. And Let's Go also offers information for alternative travelers such as gay/lesbian resources, music/club-o-philes, a list of used bookstores, and so forth.

It's written entirely by Harvard students: each summer, a skeleton crew of harried researcher-writers, paid a pittance, go out and physically check every listing, every year. They report back to the main office in Cambridge, MA periodically, where a team of underappreciated editors compiles their reports into next year's book. I was the researcher-writer for Hawaii in 1994, and so I can confidently attest to the merits of this system. It's based on the real experience of a live college student trying to do the stuff that's written about, and that sense of fun, frustration, and whirlwind tourism comes through in the writing.

When I came to NYC this guide was the first thing I bought. I'd encourage you to do the same!

Heyyy, Barry ... I haven't checked out this book yet, but I do know that there is no "c" in "Baedeker." So maybe you shouldn't get so worked up about other people's mistakes if you can't even correct your own.

Three years ago, Mayor Giuliani signed my Big Apple Corner (W. 54th & Broadway) bill into law. It's now generally accepted that John J. Fitz Gerald (who lived there 30 years) called NYC "the Big Apple" in the 1920s, and that jazz musicians used the term in the 1930s. This is correct in LONELY PLANET, BAEDECKER'S, and COMPLETE IDIOT'S NYC guides. Let's Go consistently gets it wrong! I mailed them the info! I e-mailed ten times! Never even a response! And this book tells you how to write and e-mail Let's Go to correct outdated information! I don't like doing this, but they're going to get a "one star" review from me every year until they get this right--or at least RESPOND to me! If they screwed up this--how can you have faith in anything else in the book?