15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Useful Guide, May 11, 2009
This review is from: Moon Spotlight Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Paperback)
Used this guide almost exclusively on a recent 5-day trip to Charleston. The recommendations for both attractions and places to eat were quite good and completely accurate.
We did not use the hotel recommendations since the hotels in downtown Charleston are all quite expensive. If driving it will save a lot of money to stay outside the downtown area and just park the car in a garage once you get there.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Some flaws, but terrific writing elevates it above them, January 20, 2012
I love guidebooks--I get them for every city I can. If you were to look at the guidebook section of my bookshelf (oh yes, there's a guidebook section of my bookshelf) you would see a profound diversity in types. Because while every company makes a guide for London and Barcelona, the pickings are often slimmer for Jacksonville and Cleveland.
And that's one of the big things I like about Moon: they make terrific guidebooks for the smaller cities in America. If you're heading to Minneapolis or Baltimore or Nashville, you can count on Moon. They're clear, concise, and extremely user-friendly. Their maps, in particular, can hold their own against any guidebook company short of Eyewitness.
However, many of Moon's best features are missing in the Spotlight series. You see, the Spotlights (almost literally, from what I can see) simply take a chunk of material from a bigger guide--in this case, Moon's Charleston/Savannah Handbook--and repackage it for a slightly lower price. This is lazy publishing on the face of it, but isn't necessarily an issue. The big problem is that in the repackaging, they leave out a lot of the goods. You don't get the detailed color maps in the beginning of the book, you don't get as much information about the logistics of travelling around the city, and (most importantly) you don't get Moon's superb indices. No restaurant index, no hotel index, and not even a general index of any kind in the back. That makes searching through the book much more difficult.
So that's a legitimate flaw, and there's no way around it. Thankfully, the rest of this book is great. Jim Morekis rises above standard guidebook prose and manages to be a fun guy to read. He's opinionated in a good way, well-informed, and a pleasure to read. Any issues I have with this book are not issues with him. There is no doubt that he made my daytrip to Charleston more educational and more fun.
All things considered, I recommend this book if you go in knowing its limitations. Actually a good solution might be to simply spend the extra few bucks on the full Charleston/Savannah Moon. It's got the full index (9 pages!), more color, and the same author. Unless, of course, you're like me and don't fancy the idea of a book on your shelf that says "Savannah" on its spine when you only went to Charleston... :)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A bit disapointed, November 19, 2011
When my husband and I are going to go on a vaccation~ i do a considerable amount of research of the area (via books, online, etc) as I am disabled and am only able to do a certain amount of 'sightseeing' per day before i am compleatly worn out. Therefore I order many guide books, and do read them to obtain all the information i possibly can get before going on our journey.
This guide is written mainly with Charleston's war history in mind. The author does mention, but very limited so, the other aspects of Charleston that other guide books do include in much more detail. For example, when speaking of one of the plantations (which i am excited to see as we do not have them where i live) he speaks of how the home/land/family is aquainted and how the war affected the property. No depth of description of the gardens, of the archituchure sp? of the home and so forth. Very little mention of the natural (marshes/land) elements, where I would like to read more about this as this is something i would like to go and see.
If you are a war historian, you will undoubtly sp? like this guidebook, but if you are looking for an indept guidebook on plantations/gardens~ lakes/marshes~ wildlife~ and so forth then i would chose another book.
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