Cultured Travel Guide Books - The Rough Guide to Southwest USA 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides) |
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.90434
EAN: 9781843536833
ISBN: 1843536838
Label: Rough Guides
Manufacturer: Rough Guides
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 612
Publication Date: 2006-10-02
Publisher: Rough Guides
Studio: Rough Guides |
| Spotlight Customer Reviews: |
Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Rough Guide to Southwest USA 4 (rough Guide Travel Guides)
Comment: I love this guide, very useful, concise, and easy to find information. It also gives names of books we can read before having the great adventure to visit the west of USA. I think I got to know the WEst before being there thanks to this guide.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Covering the Southwest in Small Print
Comment: I recently traveled through the Southwest, and picked up this guide as well as three others to prepare for the journey. I agree wholeheartedly with the previous comments about the disdain Greg Ward showers on his subject matter as well as his fixation on a certain chain of budget motels. (I actually stayed at one of his recommended motels in Benson, Arizona - it was like most other budget hotels in the USA.) The book is also bulky, with the typical small print of the Rough Guide series.
However, for all its faults, it appears to be one of the more comprehensive, current travel guides available for the Southwest region. As long as you also refer to other materials and insights, this guide book will serve as a good foundation for your trip across the Southwest.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive guide with a disdainful tone for the subject matter
Comment: I recently made a road trip across the American Southwest and purchased both the Lonely Planet 4th Edition (December 2005) and the Rough Guide 4th Edition (October 2006) as my guides for the week-long adventure. The Rough Guide, while still far above Frommer's or a Mobile guide, just does not compare to the Lonely Planet guide. This Rough Guide is oversized (nearly twice as thick as its competitor), but doesn't offer any significant additional information for all that bulk.
The author has a clear distaste for the Southwest, referring to the desolation and hum-drum nature of many of the Southwest outpost towns. Clearly, anyone buying this book already chose to spend time in the Southwest, so the haughty attitude about what could possibly carry a visitor to certain towns, or about the availability of only chain motels, wears thin fast.
The big selling point of the Rough Guide is the additional historical and contextual information provided along the journey. For example, I learned that Smokey Bear does not, in fact, have "the" in the middle of his name, and one is best to remember that before visiting Capitan, New Mexico. The guide also has hundreds of black and white photos scattered throughout the text, some of dubious utility to the reader.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Guide so far
Comment: This is the best guide I have found on New Mexico so far. It has definitely helped to narrow down the list of things to do on a trip. Also this guide listed the free admission days for museums, which is great if you have a tight budget. It even had an awesome reading list of fiction and non-fiction books to read before or on your trip. The best part of this guide is that I will be able to re-use it for other trips to Utah, Arizona, and southwest Colorado.
The other thing I recommend is to write to the National Park Service for their brochures on the National Parks, Forests, and Monuments you want to visit. They will send you a bunch of related brochures to give you ideas of what to do in the area.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Rough Guide to Southwest USA 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)
Comment: Excellent help in planning trip to the south west USA.
We intend to take a two week auto trip in the area and it has some great ideas for the visit.
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| Editorial Reviews: |
Comprehensively covering New Mexico & Arizona, and stretching into some highly visited parts of Nevada (Las Vegas) and Southwest Colorado (Mesa Verde National Park), the Rough Guide to Southwest USA covers the region not just as a collection of states but both in the manner people tend to visit and by defining what the Southwest means. The area is one of the great road trip destinations in America, full of scenic national parks, unusual geological formations, unique cities like Santa Fe, vintage Americana, and Wild West towns. There are great features on Southwest movie locations, native peoples, adobe architecture and the like, and plenty of practical details and descriptions for hikes and other outdoor activities.
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