Customer Reviews

Let's Go Israel: The Student Travel Guide

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

 

 

I definitely regret buying this travel guide for my trip to Israel. The most frustrating and glaring problem I found is that it DOES NOT CONTAIN A MAP OF ISRAEL. I was pretty aghast when I found this elementary feature lacking. There are maps of each region of the country in its respective section of the book, and there are a few small mostly blank Israel maps used to demonstrate suggested itineraries, but there is no one map of Israel with cities and roads marked. Awful, egregious. Also, in one of the mostly blank maps of possible itineraries, Petra is depicted RIGHT NEXT TO JERUSALEM. Are you kidding me? These people cannot be serious. Petra is in Jordan, at least 150 km from Jerusalem as the crow flies. What an absolutely embarrassing map. The book is also rife with misspellings and incorrect grammar, and certain passages were copied verbatim in multiple places. It's written by Harvard students who want you to know they're Harvard students, so it reads like one big non-stop pedantic masturbation. To be fair, the recommendations and most of the information I found to be fairly accurate. But overall I wish I would have gone with Lonely Planet like every single other traveler I met there. Skip this guide and spare yourself the intense waves of rage and remorse sure to wash over you when you discover that you've spent your hard-earned money on an absolute catastrophe of a guide book.

This is the best travel book I have ever seen. No pictures is why I usually avoid this kind, but I needed details and this had it. Amazing. I would buy a "Let's Go" for any country I would be visiting.

I just used this guidebook for my visit to Israel and the territories recently (March 2010) and whilst it does provide a good general overview and gives some excellent "travel" advice in parts . It does read as very secular and in some areas it's guidance is not really thought out.

I'd thought it would have made sense; particularly as the guide is subtitled "The Holy Land" for it to be more focused on Israel's "faith" sites and special "cultural" locations. But "Let's Go Israel" devotes a lot of its limited space to discussing Tel-Aviv's night clubs scene as it does for it's places of worship. Don't get me wrong it does have some info about the various mosques, synagogues etc. In my mind however, it's weird to give equal priority to describe gay/lesbian venues in Jerusalem as it is to also see the most "revered" sites in the "Holy" City.

Many therefore potentially important religious or significant cultural places are not found; as they probably only merit a small "faith" significance verses the "sightseeing" wow part of a travel guide. That's fine for say visiting Australia, but come on this is Promised land we talking about !! For example I wanted help seeing Biblical Shiloh or Bethany, but couldn't find even a passing reference to it in the book. When I did eventually get to these sites, to me they were the highlight of the trip . A lot more important then finding the best coffee bar in Haifa

Let GO has numerous maps ,some great;some not so good. In some instances it symbolized all the favorite places to dine, but not say where the tourist office or given attractions where! Quite a few times I read the blurb about a place to see, but then no directions or maps to actually go to it. I had to buy another map to actually locate these spots.

The editors were generally even handed in their comments on the politics and faith issues, a bit liberal and "hippy-dippy ish", but what would you expect in a student guide ?. It was at times surprisingly balanced given the passionate debates of the region. History summaries were good and the phrase dictionary at the back of the book a great help. Probably the best parts of the guide were the accommodation reviews and in country travel advice.

Overall a fairly decent travel companion, but of limited help outside of a secular viewpoint.

My wife and I traveled through Israel with a baby in tow using this guide. We are probably not the target audience of this book, but we still found it useful. Good coverage of the many amazing sites Israel and the Palestinian territories offer - religious and otherwise. Accommodations and restaurant listings are, unsurprisingly, almost exclusively budget-oriented. We learned to ignore the book's sight recommendations pretty early on. The food recommendations should also be taken with a grain of salt lest the authors' liberal use of superlatives lead you to over-anticipation of some pretty average falafel. I found it surprisingly unpolitical considering that most Let's Go guides I've used have read like they're written by wild-eyed political science majors - which they often are.

Let's Go Israel is by far the best guide on the shelves for travel in the Holy Land. Quick and easy to understand, Let's Go's guide does more than simply tell you how to see the Dome of the Rock or the Western Wall. This guide brings you beyond the basics of travel in Israel - it doesn't just tell you how to take the most culturally diverse walking tours, it even tells you what falafel joint to stop at when you get ferklempt along the way. Would recommend for anyone.