Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116130 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

Useful but flawed
Personally, I found the authors' style a bit annoying - their tone tends to be a bit patronising and cliched at times - rich, well-educated, New Worlders looking at quaint, cutesy Olde Europe. Furthermore, they are very "present" in their descriptions and at times it sounds a bit like a travel diary - a sample:

"At the end of the market, a young man is frying potato cakes...we can't resist asking for a couple. A dozen different fruit tarts appeal to our sweet tooth, so we carry off [two] to complete our lunch al fresco in the Jardin de Luxembourg."

From a practical point of view, two small additions would have greatly improved the usefulness of the book - some maps to help speed up the process of choosing which markets to visit and a list of all the markets on each day of the week (trying to find a market that is on a particular day involves checking the summary entries, market by market, arrondissement by arrondissement).

Finally, the format of this book and several others by the same publisher is annoying - it is very small, but with thick paper. On the one hand it is small enough to take on holiday with you but the pages are impossible to flick through and the binding has already broken - the pages will start falling out soon and my copy is only a few weeks, and one trip, old.

Given all of that, why have I given it three stars? Well, it does have a lot of very useful information - I found out about several markets that were well worth visiting that weren't mentioned in other general guide books, the photographs a nice, and it is pleasant to dip into and dream about living in Paris and having all this on your doorstep.