Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet USA (1st ed)

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

 

 

Do you want to see if America is still out there? Then this is the book to avoid. I've used Lonely Planet Guides before and really wanted to like this book. The truth is, you'd do well to purchase instead Jamie Jensen's Road Trip USA (avail thru Amazon) which is the best guide out there right now.

Typical of Lonely Planet, only very pronounced in this volume, writers' comments are often riddled with sarcasm and condescension, and worse--are too often incorrect. These writers will have you looking for places that may have existed years ago, and it is now clear to me that their reissues are not carefully updated, but reprinted with new covers. If you've used Lonely Planet Guides before, you've probably noticed these qualities, and while a travel guide cannot be perfect in all directives, it surely can be much less rude and lazy than this one. I left their East Africa book in Tanzania as its lack of accurate information was a complete joke, and although the book made for a pretty coaster, it became a burden.

The purpose of a travel guide is to guide readers to highlights of each place and to inform and educate at the same time. One quickly learns to read between the lines (for example, if a particular hotel is given rave reviews, it will probably be crowded by others with the same travel guide), but it is difficult to forgive L.P. writers their holier-than-thou attitude. I found in this volume that they are too quick to insult and degrade even the most sacred places. Stay away from this book--unless you just want to see a lot of pretty pictures, which is the primary reason I gave it the one star. They do make one of the best travel series on televsion. Maybe they should apply some of those talents to their written guides. It's been a long time since I noticed them being conscientious in their travel guides--which is a real shame, especially for such an expensive guide. There are a lot of better, more accurate guides out there.

Recently, I took a cross-country trip for six weeks and used this book along with several others to help plan our itinerary. It is informative and has some decent city maps, but gives very limited options for lodging and provides little detail on quality of hotels, motels, etc. Many prices and phone numbers are outdated- an unpleasant surprise!
I would recommend using this guide only as a supplement - it has some good suggestions on things to do and see, but you'll definitely need other books along with it. For the money, there are better options out there.

To date I have 20 old and new Lonely Planets. I am a big fan but this obviously rushed to print, unedited and factually incorrect book is enough to stop my LP loyalty in a New York minute.

Without going into the many many examples where this book is factually incorrect and outdated let me say that I haved lived in the US (east and west coast) for a year now and have on my weekends journeyed to various parts of the country - I have yet to find this book helpful or correct.

Try Frommer's USA and (in agreement with Robin - see review) Jamie Jensen's Road Trip USA.

Admittedly, it's the first time out for a whole-USA guide from those Australian backpackers, but this guide has a long way to go. Fine cultural information, but this book's write-ups are ambiguous at best, treating the best hostels in the USA the same as the very worst. True, these books are accurate, if by accurate one means "not listing any hard information so that the hard information can never be wrong."

This travel guide probably says more about the authors' perception of the US than what America is truly about. The book assumes that you are from a Commonwealth country (read: Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and to a lessor extent, Canada) because everything is compared with the broad Commonwealh culture. If you don't understand much of the Commonwealth culture (such as cricket) you may comfortably skip the entire culture section.

Another thing is that some descriptions are incorrect. For example, it claimed that New Yorkers had ties "back to the UK" during the American War of Independence. In reality there was no country called the United Kingdom until 1801, well after the end of the war.

So my advice: try another travel guide.

I bought and use this book during a recent trip to DC and NYC. Advices and directions were right and extremely useful. Map quality has improved since earlier guides. Maybe, it lacks details about passes for local transportation (eg NYC) I recommend it over other guide books.

Gives much more than directions and information. The history of the region, culture and geographical information added a lot of value to my understanding of the U.S.A.

The approach and treatment of the subject is much more "warm" than those of other guides like Let's go U.S.A.

A good addition to the LP series.