Customer Reviews

The Rough Guide to Jerusalem

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The Rough Guide is comprehensive without being overwhelming - a truly useful pocket guide to a city which defies unilateral description. I have found this the most portable, versatile guide for city travel and expansive, reflecting quality writing and research.

I found this guide to be very useful. I just returned from an 11-day trip to Jerusalem in which I traveled throughout the city and outlying areas. The details in the maps are accurate and essential to finding destinations. The historic, political, and cultural aspects are presented with, I believe, a slightly Palestinian biased approach. Look, there is no way you can visit Israel and especially Jerusalem without an opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; if you do not come with an opinion, you will certainly leave with a few. The issues are highly complex and layered and not to be taken lightly. Any author writing about the city must assert some positions, to do otherwise would be intellectually dishonest. Author Daniel Jacobs does his best to navigate these treacherous waters, although you may detect a well-informed bias. Don't let this stop you from buying/using this wonderful guide.

The author of this book is extremely biased against Israel. he seems to practically bendover backwards to put a pro Arab slant to just about everything in the book. I couln't understand why he would not just simply describe the scene or location with out finding something nasty to say about israel. I was almost expecting him to blame any bad weather on the Israeli government.I was extremely disapointed , and to me it seemed that he found himself a soap box , at my expense. It's a shame that he put so much effort into trashing a country , instead of concentrating his efforts on presenting the beauty of such a pretty and culturally rich land. My suggestion, find another tour book. if you want to sunscribe to the authors sentiments , you can find the same stuff on Al Jezzira.

I had been preparing for my first visit to Israel, and wanted to find a practical and not overtly politically-slanted travel. I was surprised how hard that actually was. By all means avoid the blantanly anti-Jewish-slanted travel guide issued by the otherwise reliable Eyewitness Travel Guides. This book at times also felt slightly biased (see for example its comments on the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz newspapers), but I checked it out nevertheless.

"The Rough Guide to Jerusalem (2009 Edition)" (320 pages) starts with about 50 pages of "the basics" such as getting there, getting around, culture and etiquette, etc. I thought that was very helpful. After that the book dives into a detailed overview of Jerusalem. The commentary in the book on Jerusalem is quite useful but ultimately too much, as it takes up almost 200 pages of the book. It leaves only 40 pages dealing with the rest of Israel (Tel Aviv/Jaffa, Masada and the Dead Sea, Bethlehem, Jericho, etc.). In the end, I found that this book is too unbalanced and too heavily Jerusalem-focused, and I would not recommend it if you are going to spend a lot of time outside of Jersusalem. As an alternative, I might suggest "Fodor's Israel" which covers all of Israel in great depth, and not just Jerusalem.

Apart from the travel guide, I can't say enough about my recent visit to Israel, my first time there. I spent most of my time outside of Jerusalem (Tel Aviv, Haifa, Masada/Dead Sea/Negev desert), reason I would not recommend this particular travel guide. Prior to getting there, I had high expectations, and they were met, and then some. One of the most pleasant surprises in my long travel history. Just a beautiful country, with so much to offer on so many levels. One of the most striking things is that in the 7 days I was there, I hardly saw any military, police or security personnel, which absolutely amazed me (in the most pleasant way). Can't wait to go back there at some point.