Barrie Kerper

This collection of articles (most re-printed) has something for everyone who is planning, or dreaming of planning, a trip to Paris. Use it to supplement traditional guide books: included are some wonderful pieces about the cafe culture (including etiquette and dos & don't's), specific arrondissements (including le Marais, to my delights), areas outside of Paris (Versailles, Chartes, Loire Valley), and little-known treasures within. A love letter to Paris, essentially. Feel free to skim over some parts and dive into others.… (mais)

The Collected Traveler series is intended to give a visitor a feel for the place through a collection of articles. It's not supposed to take the place of a guidebook and it's not supposed to be too time sensitive. I wish the author had reminded herself of that while she was putting the book together. It's a largish book, but a third is taken up with the sort of things one uses a guidebook for; packing guidelines, currency tips, etc.. I think that Kerper, traveling as frequently as she does, wanted to help out the first time traveler, but the result is a lot of filler that is organized better in any Fodor's or Lonely Planet guide. Then there were the articles, several of which were interesting, like the one on how to greet people and how to ask for the bill. The ones on food and wine are always fun, although I was disappointed to find that some were merely a series of restaurant reviews, again something done better by a proper guidebook.

I recently read Kerper's book on Venice and found the same flaws. The concept is amazing, but it's disappointing how poorly it was executed. Every so often, though, an article would be wonderful, full of the kind of history and observations that really makes a trip more interesting, but there is so much more dross than gold.… (mais)

This is not a travel guide in the usual sense. Instead, Barrie Kerper has collected a selection of articles about the city and the surrounding area and presented them according to topic. I read several of the articles while traveling to Venice and there were a few that did enhance our time there, especially those on the food and wine of the region. There was also a wonderful essay by Jan Morris about a day on Torchello that was worth the price of the book, although we didn't visit that island. There were fewer articles about Venice than I expected because the author wanted to include a large area around Venice, explaining that she wasn't going to do a full book about the region, but wanted to include the articles she'd collected. The first two hundred pages of the book are taken up with an abbreviated traditional travel guide to Venice, giving not enough information to serve instead of a travel guide, while taking up space that could have been used to include more interesting articles. There was some good information in this first section, but it could have been covered in an article written by the author, omitting all the repetitive items and things best covered elsewhere.

In short, this is a good book to use to prepare for a trip to Venice, but not one to carry along with you. It suffers from a lack of focus, but many of the articles in the book are worth reading.… (mais)