Alan Tillier | Anna Brooke
1 the Best
The DK Eyewitness Travel Guide series is always top notch, the Paris book being a sterling example. My edition was acurate with opening/closing times for sights, great maps, interesting pictures, helpful informaton, good layout & design. Besides the intricacies of the city, outside sites like EuroDisneyLand or the Palace of Versailles are covered well.
Perhaps boderline as to whether it is a little too heavy to carry around all day, you must have it and take it with you at least as far as the hotel. this book goes well with the Access Guide to Paris.
2 Like a Beautiful Brick
The Eyewitness Books are beautiful. They are printed on high quality glossy paper, have magnificent photos, and are a joy to read and hold. But, I think they make better coffee table fodder than they do actual practical guide books for tourists.
If you just want to hit the most famous places, this guide would do. They do not go into depth about Paris, they stick to the tourist highlights. There are snippets of historical information about the City of Light, but they are not profound enough to justify its biggest drawback: its WEIGHT. This is an exceptionally heavy volume, and you will not like feeling as if you are carrying around 12 bricks in your "sac" at the end of the day. Trust me, if you can't live without DK Eyewitness, take their Top 10 Paris book on your sightseeing tours. It's much lighter and just as pretty as the full version.
I recommend you plan your trip with the uglier but more informative Frommers, and walk with DK Eyewitness Top 10.
3 The best travel guide!
I must say that I love this book. My sister and I went to Paris last April for about a week, and this book was our bible.
It was actually loaned to me by a teacher at the school were I work, who is from Paris. She said in her opinion this was the best guide for someone who is going to Paris for the first time.
I am so glad I had it with me, it was very informative, easy to understand and overflowing with useful information. One of the best pieces of information I found was that some historical monuments are free the first Sunday of the month. This was extremely useful to us, especially since our third day in Paris was the first Sunday of the month.
We ended up getting into the Norte Dome for free and a couple of other places. It was great because by that time we were beginning to feel the effects of paying the sometimes-high fees to get into most of the other historical monuments.
If we did not have this book we would have wasted lots of time trying to figure out what to see and how to get around. In response to the reviewer who said that this book does not go into depth or explain enough about the historical monuments, I say a person traveling to Paris should already have a good deal of knowledge about the history of Paris and its sites.
In conclusion, I think this book is great and recommend it to anyone going to Paris.
4 reliable and easy to navigate
On a recent trip to Paris, I took along a DK Eyewitness guide for Paris as well as a Frommer's guide. In all honesty, I could have relied solely on the DK guide and been fine. The photographs are helpful when you need to locate different landmarks and structures and the maps are VERY reliable (unlike Frommer's), which is absolutely essential in a city like Paris.
If you choose DK guides that focus on a particular city or region, they are slimmer and more portable than the all-country guides. Information has been whittled down to the essentials, which I must admit has its downsides. At times I wish the writers provided more information on cultural aspects, but there are other guides for that. DK guides focus on destinations such as museums, gardens, parks, historic homes, etc. I would have to agree that the sections on hotels and restaurants are almost useless. Single sentence descriptions, although concise, aren't necessarily helpful when trying to choose an interesting location.
The best feature of DK guides is the ease with which you can navigate each guide. I've browsed through (and read) many, and they all have the same format. The history sections are useful and concise, and the divisions within each guide actually make sense. After a little while, you can quickly determine which page to flip to when you need to look up transporation tips or maps, or whatever else you might need.
As for the Paris guide, I found it informative and accurate. I do wish the guide provided more information about holidays and national celebrations. I traveled during Christmas and didn't know what to expect. I have to admit, though, that many guides don't cover holidays well. So for all of you that may wonder, the Champs-Elysees is surprisingly busy (albiet with tourists) Christmas day, the metro operates all day, patisseries, charcuteries, and other specialty food shops are open in the morning (for all those tardy shoppers I suspect), there are many eateries open in the more touristy areas, parks are less crowded and have some French families strolling about, and it IS bitterly cold. Oh, and it's sleepier the day after Christmas.
5 Great Book to Plan ahead
That's a good book to consult before travelling especially if it's a first time visiting Paris. I used it to plan my vacation to not waste time when I arrive there. It is very useful to plan ahead and to consult on site. I also recommend along with it Let's go map guide Paris by Inc Let's go.
6 Essential for the first time traveler to Paris
The DK Eyewitness Travel Guide for Paris is a perfect product for the first time traveler to Paris. I have used it the last 3 times I was in Paris, but I found it most useful on the first trip. It also makes great reading before going to Paris. Read it on the plane!
The historic chapters are brief but essential to understanding the history of France and the city of Paris. This is especially helpful in uderstanding the revolution and the Bourbon restoration after Napoleon I under Louis XVIII and his younger brother Charles X, followed by their cousin Louis-Philippe I and the take-over of government by Napoleon III.
Medieval Paris is still present in Paris at the Louvre, Notre-Dame, and Sainte-Chapelle. Sainte-Chapelle is not easily accessed and the guide helps you find your way to the entrance of this Gothic jewel. The guide has a special section on Sainte-Chapelle, the first Gothic structure, with its thin columns holding up beautiful glass walls of red and blue.
Renaissance Paris can be found in the wonderful Place Royale (Place des Vosges). This space is amazing, and continues to be used for housing and shops after 400 years. Within Place des Vosges is the Victor Hugo Museum, showing his apartment furnished with his original furniture. Just relax in the central courtyard.
The guide color codes the various Quaters of the city, offering the highlights of each section of the city, along with suggested walking routes. This helps the travel orient to the book while walking and also helps avoid the naggig problem of missing a point of interest while nearby.
A full 22 pages is devoted at the beginning of the guide with an extended time-line showing the history of Paris and offering tips on sites to visit to capture various eras in the city's history. I found this especially useful in understanding the grand transformation of the city under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann in which avenues and boulevards were widened, and the city became more accessible with broad grids and multiple spoke-like intersections. Because of this design, traffic jams are rare. When traveling, a slow-down on one street can be rectified by simply moving over one street. Travel patterns in the city are infinite.
The guide is well illustrated, with photographs, maps, drawings, charts and tables, all of which help the traveler orient and enjoy.
Because many travelers are in Paris only for a couple of days, the guide highlights the cities main tourist attractions and gives these sites ample explanation: Sainte-Chapelle, Versailles Palace, Pompidou Center, Musee d'Orsay, Eiffel Tower, Jardin du Luxembourg, Musee du Louvre, Notre Dame, an the Arc de Triomphe.
The guide includes a map of the metro system, which is inexpensive, convenient, and quick. However, be careful of pick-pockets at the metro stops at the major tourist sites. The gude advises you to buy a book of 10 metro rides at once for a cost saving. If you plan on being in the city long, this is a good idea.
There is a general subject index that is very thorough. For example, there are 17 entrys under Victor Hugo; 6 for Jean-Paul Sartre; and 24 for Pablo Picasso.
The maps at the end of the book were excellent and worth the price of the book. The street finder allowed you to orient yourself quickly if lost. The street finder was great for finding obscure addresses. We found the studios of Paul Braque and Nicholas De Stahl in hidden neighborhoods.
We had to use a taxi because we were late for a concert. The city is not taxi dependent like New York and Barcelona and thus taxis are harder to catch and more expensive. The bus routes are well marked and whereas they take longer than the undergound metro, you certainly see more of the city from a bus.
The guide helps explain the train system. I have come into Paris from Madrid, Brussels, and left Paris for Amsterdam and Frankfurt. It is important to know which train station to use. For example when arriving from or going to Amsterdam and Brussels you must use the Gare du Nord. When going to or arriving from Spain, you must use Gare Montparnasse. When going to or arriving from Frankfurt, you must use Gare de L'Est. you are in big trouble if you assume all these stations service the same destinations. The guide helps you sort this out so that you can use the train system in Paris conveniently.
The guide even tells you about the public toilets in Paris, which are conveniently located but the city needs far more of them. They are inexpensive and the entire little bathroom is washed down with sprinklers between users.
The street markets in Paris are wonderful and the guide tells you how to find the various markets. There are great cheese buys which you can take back to your hotel room to enjoy during your stay. The Passages are worth visiting for covered shopping. Walk down Rue du Faubourg St. Honore at least once to see the Chanel and Hermes flagship stores.
The guide also offers five guided walks. There are other books on this topic that offer many walking suggestions. This is one of the few weaknesses of the book, more suggested walks would be great.
As you can see, I found this guide to be fantastic, full of detail and pictures and maps. If I could give it six stars, I would.
7 Make Eyewitness essential part of your travel fun
DK's Eyewitness Travel Guides are our best travel companion during our tour of Europe. Full of tips, pictures, maps, site info, history, local reference ... every page is not only helpful but beautiful. The layout anf format is very innovative and reader friendly, a ture standing out from any other travel books. It was interesting to see that almost everywhere we went, we saw other people (tourists apparently) holding and checking the same DK book on the street.
The coverage is comprehensive and growing year after year, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice ... every city we went have its own Eyewitness serie. We studied them before our trip, consulted them during our trip, and kept them as memo and photo book after our trip. They are simply essential part of the travel fun.
I recommend buying indiviual city/area book wherever possible instead of the country book. For example, buy Rome, Florence, and Venice books instead of Eyewitness Italy (unless your destination doesn't have its own Eyewitness). That way you get more detailed and targeted info.
8 Great Photography and Descriptions, Takes You There
I have to confess up front. I love these books. I must have a dozen. I really like the Paris book, and the one for Prague, and Stockholm, and South Africa, and .... You get all the detailed material similar to other great travel books plus you get great visuals.
On a cold day back here in the USA (or Canada) or elsewhere, have a glass of French wine and sit in a nice chair or in the garden on a warm day and read this book. For a moment you will be back in Paris. The same with the Stockholm book. You are back in a small restaurant or museum.
It is not a Michelin guide but that is okay. The photos and desicriptions and cutaway drawings are excellent and more than make up for any lack of small detail. But there is lots of detail here. The book includes the history of Paris and many details on the art, art galleries, parks, cutaway views of historical buildings, and many other things of interest. The history is summarized at the beginning of the book with historical time lines and cross referenced to the culture and political figures. A solid 400 page effort - lots of stuff to see and absorb.
It has the other things too such as maps, accomodations, transportation, and the rest. The Michelin guide has more sub-detail but this book is still the best for a visitor.
You will be pleasantly suprised with the depth and quality of this book and it makes a nice souvenir to refresh your memory.
Jack in Toronto
9 Visually appealing but no hard-core info.
I think the title of my review wraps it all up: the eyewitness guides are a work of graphic art. Their highlight is probably the great work on the maps, both small and large scale, which are of great help as you navigate around the city looking for sights. As a tool for reaching all of the sights you want to see, I would say that the Eyewitness Guide is among the best, with its street map, neighborhood maps and Metro/subway guide. In addition to this, as another positive comment I would say that it is a great guide to take on a trip if you don't have much time and you need information presented in an easy-to-read, simple manner. The drawings and photos, and the way they are laid out, is very appealing.
The advantages stop there, however. If you really want to get to know a city, you simply need more in-depth historical and cultural information on the sights you are seeing. Most of the locations described in the Eyewitness Guide do not stretch beyond a paragraph or two, which is quite superficial in my opinion. If you really want to know about the history behind the church, monument, museum or park you have traveled so far to see, you will definitely need another guidebook to give you any kind of detail. This flaw becomes far worse when you read the sections on sights outside of the city or in the suburbs (which are many!). The descriptions become utterly superficial.
Harsh critique also for the hotel and restaurant information, which is limited to places designed for the rich and famous, or at least the very upper of the upper-middle class. The best guides give you a little info. on all styles of lodging and food, from low budget to luxury, but these guides make little effort to do so, and even the information on the laps of luxury is limited to little symbols, instead of providing descriptions like other guides do.
With this combination of characteristics, I think Eyewitness is good to take along for a short trip in which you have little time to spend seeing the city and you don't really care about getting any deep information on what you're seeing. Otherwise, keep looking for another guidebook.
10 Wonderful visually-oriented guide!
I have the older edition that I bought back in 2001, and it's fantastic. I used this book everywhere for my two-week trip to Paris, and more than the other three guide books I bought. The reason this book is so useful is that it doesn't describe the sites in long wordy paragraphs like the others. It's the one book I carried around everywhere. It includes tons of pictures that allow you tell quickly if you're at the right location, even if there's no sign (or if the sign is in a strange language). The pictures and illustrations make all the difference, and the layout is easy to understand. The maps are also useful and clear. The binding is also reasonably good quality, so that it hasn't fallen apart in spite of heavy use. I just loaned my friend this book, and he used it on his ten-day trip to Paris, and he also liked it. I can only imagine that this latest edition is as good or better than the one I have. If I make another trip to another place or city, I'll check what this series has to offer, first.
11 Outstanding
...P>It is outstanding. The illustrations are excellent, the maps accurate and detailed. The only better map is the No 2 Plan to public transport available free from Metro stations, which shows metro , RER and bus routes with named streets, and the more expensive book maps by arrondissement available in Paris.
But unless you want to cart around two books, the maps in this volume are excellent (warning: there are a few places they DON'T cover, so if you are planning visits to some of the less touristed arrondissements, you will need a map book as well).
I used this in conjunction with Fodor's Around Paris With Kids, and together they covered everything we needed as a family.
The house style of Eyewitness Guides is now well-known, and this volume is as good as, if not better, than any. You really can't go wrong if you pack this. It will even make you want to go places you might otherwise have dismissed.
12 An almost perfect travel book
There are two kinds of travel books: those you use to help you plan a trip and those you want to have in your pocket when you make it. This exceptional book falls into the latter. Although it features some information on hotels and travel, these aspects of a prospective trip to Paris will be handled much more thoroughly by other volumes. Where this book excels is in its comprehensive coverage of things that any traveler will want to know, primarily the question: Where am I, and what do I want to see while in this section of Paris? Some travel books contain more information, but many of these fail to filter that which is likely to be of interest and that which is not. What is amazing about this one is the usability and pertinacity of the information presented.
The book begins with a brief history of Paris, and then provides an overview of the city as a whole. Much of the remainder of the volume consists of introductions to specific areas of Paris, letting any traveler know what the immediate highlights in any area are. The presentation of the information is as attractive as one can imagine, with beautiful graphics, beautiful photographs, and marvelous summations of the various highpoints in the city. The book ends with a useful index and a collection of high quality maps. Best of all, the book is amazingly compact and durable given the sheer mass of information it packages. Unlike its competitors, it will never be an encumbrance because of its size.
I have not looked at any of the other DK Eyewitness Travel Guides, but this one is so gorgeous that it is definitely the series that I would look at first in any trip that I was contemplating making. It is such a marvelous book that one could consult it with profit merely as a way of getting to know a city, even if one is not planning to travel there.
13 Just got back from Paris, This book is all you need
I just got back from Paris and can honestly say this is all you need. I kept this book in my pocket the whole time. It has great maps for getting around. The Metro map is quick and easy to use for getting around. The book breaks down Paris into areas and gives you pictures and descriptions of all the interesting sites to see in that area. Each description provides a metro stop and a location on one of the maps. The maps give you locations of all the metro stops. This was an invaluable tool for my group. We would go to an area and have full confidence wandering around knowing that DK would help us if we ran into a problem. I bought a bunch of books before my trip, but this is the only one you need!
