Customer Reviews

Museum Companion to Los Angeles: A Guidebook to Museums, Historic Houses, Libraries, Special Collections, Botanical Gardens, and Zoos in LA County

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

 

 

This book provides a very useful overview of museums both large & small across the LA Basin. From the Norton Simon to the smallest, you'll get photos of major exhibit items, overviews of what's there, plus the stats & particulars to assure that your museum choice for a given day in not a wasted day. Buy it!

You need 3 books to enjoy LA:
1) this book, the museum companion to LA (what to do in LA)
2) Jonathan Gold's Counter Intelligence (where to eat in LA)
3) the LA/Orange County Thomas guide (how to get around in LA)

You also need to listen to the traffic report, every 10 minutes at the 01, 11, 21, etc minutes on the clock, to AM 980 to avoid our traffic.

LA is a huge melting pot - you can see it in the variety of food and museum collections. There is the netsuke collection at LACMA, Blue Boy and extensive gardens at the Huntington, the porcelain collection at the Pacific Asia Museum, the bookstore (it is ther best in town for art and architecture related books) at the Armand Hammer, the La Brea Tar Pits, California Museum of Science and Industry (free admission) with the BEST science experiments for toddlers. The book also includes lots of beautiful gardens in the area.

This great guidebook has taken me places I didn't know existed, and I have lived in Los Angeles most of my life. If you are going to spend any time in the area and like things like museums, historic exibits, gardens, etc., you will find this guide quite useful.

But don't waste your time on this 1998 edition listed here. There is a new 2011 edition that has accurate updated information. Also this 1998 edition has all black & white photos, and the newer color edition has many of the same photos, but you can discern more in them since they are now in color and much more informative.

This 1998 edition was so useful to us over the years, that the instant I saw that the new 2011 edition was out, I immediately bought several copies for me and other family members.

This is a five star book. I have given this edition a three star rating only because this edition is now obsolete, with outdated information and only black & white photos. Get the five star new edition instead!

[This review written for the 1998 edition of Museum Companion to Los Angeles.]