Best St. Petersburg Travel Guides
Full-colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - art, architecture, literature Free, convenient pull-out St Petersburg map (included in print version), plus over 15 colour maps Covers Sennaya, Kolomna, Smolny, Vosstaniya, Vasilyevsky Island, Petrogradsky Island, Vyborg Side and more. Lonely Planet covers must-see spots but also enables curious travellers to get off beaten paths to understand more of the culture of the places in which they find themselves.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I went to St Petersburg o my own and book gave great tips."
"Excellent , like all Lonely Planets."
"Very handy for my trip to Russia."
DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: St. Petersburg is your in-depth guide to the very best of the city of St. Petersburg. Whether you're on the hunt for stunning cathedrals and churches, soviet landmarks, or the best places to shop and browse, we've packed it all into this fantastic guide. • Free, color pull-out map (print edition) marked with sights, a selected sight and street index, public transit map, practical information on getting around, and a distance chart for measuring walking distances. About DK Eyewitness Travel Guides : For more than two decades, DK Eyewitness Travel Guides have helped travelers experience the world through the history, art, architecture, and culture of their destinations.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Very informative, conveniently set up by neighborhoods, excellent historical background information throughout."
"Worked great!"
"Good guide."
"Just a few central districts of the city are discussed (leaving out soooo much interesting places in St Petersburg), which makes this book a good companion for a weekend trip to St Petersburg but a poor assistant in planning a longer vacation."
"This was a great and informative guide for St. Petersburg."
"Very nice book. Lots of good information. I liked the format and colors."
This newly updated pocket travel guide for St. Petersburg will lead you straight to the best attractions this city has to offer, from the Winter Palace of the Russian royal family to the Hermitage Museum. Packed with amazing ideas, informative maps, insider tips, and useful advice, DK's Top 10 guides lead you to the very best your destination has to offer. Discover the history, art, architecture, and culture of your destination through Top 10 lists, from the best museums, bars, and sights to the places to avoid. "This [DK Eyewitness Travel: Top 10] might be the best traveling companion to throw in your pack.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, the son of a very important officer of the Czarist government, is a disoriented junior, who has a very bad relationship with his father. As proof of his loyalty to the revolutionary movement - this is 1905, the year of the Russian defeat against Japan and of the beginnings of the Russian Revolution - Nikolai is assigned a mission which consists of killing a high-ranking Czarist officer: his own father. The atmosphere's unbearable tension (as the bomb's clock goes tick tack), gives it a great intensity, as well as the mix of terror and black humor characteristic of Russian literature, with its alienated, eccentric, and tormented characters."
"My wife and I spent six days in St. Petersburg at the beginning of a Russian River cruse."
"Gave the information needed for planning a good visit."
"Its long."
"I had never heard of ST. PETERSBURG before I was assigned it as part of a college course on Russian literature in translation (circa 1974). The subject is Russia, as exemplified by St. Petersburg, the city that Peter the Great created out of swampland in order to open a window to Europe and transform Russia into a Western country. The father is a high minister in the Russian government; the son is an effete intellectual who dabbles in modern, liberal thinking. The novel presents a series of dualisms: East vs. West, father vs. son, the city vs. the provinces, revolution vs. evolution, fantasy vs. reality, order vs. chaos, and cylindrical hats vs. bowlers. I know that the Cournos translation has been criticized, and several others have since been published, including one by David McDuff (by Penguin), under the title "Petersburg". In the highly unlikely event I ever decide to read the novel a third time, I would seek out the McDuff translation."
"Apart from gross misreadings, it makes numerous cuts, which eliminate, among other things, virtually the entire persona of the narrator, whose presence is essential to any real understanding of what Bely is up to" (p. xi)."
Best Siberia Travel Guides
Against nearly insurmountable odds and relying on hunting and her own wits, Sarah Marquis survived the Mafia, drug dealers, thieves on horseback who harassed her tent every night for weeks, temperatures from subzero to scorching, life-threatening wildlife, a dengue fever delirium in the Laos jungle, tropic ringworm in northern Thailand, dehydration, and a life-threatening abscess. The descriptions of time and place are just detailed enough to become animated with life, and the author's courage is inspiring." “A National Geographic Explorer of the Year in 2014 recounts her journey with the clear-eyed resolve and keen observational skills that make her a successful solo trekker.” ― Book Page.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Author walked a long way, but didn't describe as much as I would have liked to read about."
"One to let you know what literature is out there if you are just getting started with your own armchair adventuring; and two, to show that I have a fairly good grasp of what the literature looks like. The first thing I noticed was that you can tell that an American didn't write this book. The second thing I noticed, and which is of a lot more importance is that the book is not written like a diary or a reconstruction of a story based on a diary. For some reason men on horseback would show in the middle of the night at her camps no matter how hard she had tried to stay hidden. I'm used to reading the diaries of settlers so I'm comfortable with jumps in time in that format. But as I said this isn't a diary so the jumps are a little strange and unwelcome. One example is where she tells us her personal philosophy is to never stay in one spot for more than one night unless it is an absolute emergency. She then tells us that she plans to ask him why the Mongolians are behaving in such an unexplained fashion -- women taking off their tops when in her presence and the men appearing in the middle of the night."
"I had seen a prelude on a TV show and expected greater insight into the culture and people."
"A good read."
"The books is a wonderful testament to her ferocious perseverence and also has some very poignant and heart touching moments when you can feel her loneliness and sorrow at the loss of a beloved companion."
"Couldn't put it down."
"Heard an interview on radio, which peaked my interest."
Best Moscow Travel Guides
Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace , Grossman’s Life and Fate , and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago , Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. "This panoramic history plotted as an epic family tragedy describes the lives of Bolshevik revolutionaries who were swallowed up by the cause they believed in. A twelve-hundred-page epic that recounts the multigenerational story of the famed building and its inhabitants--and, at least as interesting, the rise and fall of Bolshevist faith." "Yuri Slezkine, Mercurian par excellence, has caught an extraordinary set of lives in this book. Few historians, dead or alive, have managed to combine so spectacularly the gifts of storyteller and scholar." Yuri Slezkine’s guiding argument in this remarkable, many-layered account of the men (rarely women) who shaped the October Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were not a party but an apocalyptic sect. The House of Government is a compelling microhistory of the interwar Soviet elite, but it is also a literary-rhetorical tour de force." "A brilliant retelling of, mainly, the first two decades of the Soviet era in a sprawling saga centered around a famous and infamous Moscow apartment building created for the new elite." "[ The House of Government ] is a dizzying book, a hall of mirrors, panoramic and bizarre, as puzzlingly esoteric and thrillingly fervent as the doctrines it describes."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Some even sought to have the relevant family apartments converted into museums, as secular shrines to the departed, although Moscow’s housing shortage, which remains a constant whatever the changes in ideological climate, militated against this outcome. Thus in the 550 fully furnished family apartments in the largest residential building in Europe the new Soviet aristocracy enjoyed high ceilings and central heating as standard, whilst also enjoying access to amenities including a hairdressing salon, kindergarten, gymnasium, tennis court, library, laundry, movie theatre, and a cafeteria from which meals could be ordered for collection, at a time when most Muscovites had to make do with dilapidated and overcrowded communal apartments in which the stale smell of cabbage soup competed with the general stench of despair."
"A masterpiece - Slezkine does a superb job of weaving personal stories through this historical work, using photos, trial transcripts, and letters."
"This is a massive hybrid work that tells the personal human story of the Revolutionary Soviet elite. The book is centered around the story of the massive housing complex in Moscow built for the elite around the time of the first five-year plan (around 1930). It has grand diversions into literature, religion, russian intellectual history and all sorts of other matters. Its length and its tendency to cross so many traditional lines makes it exceptionally interesting but difficult to review. Rather than being the product of one ruthless man, Stalinism seems within the context of the book to be the inevitable outcome of the system. The author's religious analogy actually works in this case in that if their ideas had been implemented, it would have been like throwing the entire country into a monastery. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came closest to actually making that model real with all the well-known consequences. I came away seeing more clearly what a dramatic change Lenin's NEP was for the true revolutionary faithful and how it created splits within the party that were eventually only resolved through the purge trials. Dealing with the question, he launches into a rambling history of nearly every religion in the world complete with lots of personal opinions an interpretations. Certain matters should have been included in perhaps extended appendix sections where they could stand alone as diversions into topics rather than interruptions of the narrative. It expects a great degree of familiarity with Russian and Soviet history in all its aspects (political, historical, religious, cultural, literary, intellectual and more...) I personally found it very rewarding as a read. Its narrowly focused on life at the very top of society and tending toward the stories of the true-believer party members."
"This book will give the reader a depth of understanding of the terrible tragedy that ensued upon the eventual triumph in 1917 of the millenarian politics of the Russian oppositional intelligentsia of the late 19th century."
Best General Russia Travel Guides
With hundreds of full-color photographs, hand-drawn illustrations, and custom maps that illuminate every page, DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Japan truly shows you this country as no one else can. Series Overview: For more than two decades, DK Eyewitness Travel Guides have helped travelers experience the world through the history, art, architecture, and culture of their destinations. DK Eyewitness Travel Guides: the most maps, photographs, and illustrations of any guide. "Known… for its four-color maps, photos and illustrations, the [DK] Eyewitness Guides are extremely user-friendly for travelers who want their information delivered in a concise, visual way."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"As is the case with all DK Travel Guides, it is very well organized by region of the country, after providing you with an overview of Japan along with some history and cultural topics. Then when you go to each regional section, the guide has numbered points of interest or suggested places to visit that are thoroughly explained and that are keyed to a corresponding number on a road map so once again you know where you are in Japan. Finally, they provide a fairly detailed section of Travel Essentials and thoroughly cover topics such as safety, how to get around on public or private transportation, currency, health and a host of other vital topics one must consider prior to any international trip."
"I love all the Eyewitness Travel series."
"Wonderful book and layout."
"It contains detailed descriptions by region and their areas, a great section on traveler's needs (where to stay, where to eat & drink, shopping, Onsen, Theme Parks, Sports & Activities, Special interests, and a great survival guide with practical information, travel info, a life saving phrase book and a great index, the book provides a "further reading" list for you if you want to read more but honestly, with this much information it should be more than enough for my 3 week trip to Japan."
"It's a good book though as a reference."
"The pictures and illustrations are great and I have bought DK series for over ten countries."
"this book is very informative and has beautiful colored pictures."
"Well organized."