Rating: 
Summary: Good book for some
Review: This guidebook does not provide a good general overview of Paris but instead focuses on several key points of interest( museums, the Marais, rue cler, etc). If those points are what you will be going to Paris for, then this book will be all that you need. If you are looking for a good in depth overview of Paris, then this book will disappoint. Mr. Steeves clearly has his favorites in Paris and he focuses on these areas in the book. He generally steers the reader toward visiting his favorite areas like rue Cler (it is very nice) and the Marais but isn't there more to Paris than this? While Mr. Steeves occaisionally gets you off the tourist track, when using his suggestions I found myself feeling more like a tourist than a person living in Paris. Paris is not enjoyable until you make it your own and by this I mean that it helps to find your own points of interest, perhaps using Mr. Steeves book as a starting point. I stopped using this book on the second day of my trip because I found that I wanted to see areas not covered in this book. The walking tours that are in the book ARE extremely good and perhaps worth the price of the book. But was it really necessary to devote over one hundred pages of the book to give us a detailed examination of several museums? And even after this in depth examination of the contents of several museums, isn't it still much better to get one of the museums guides if you true interest is exploring museums? You'll definitely need another guide book to find interesting restaurants, but may I suggest that you take a chance and just look at where the locals eat. You will not go wrong in just about any Paris neighborhood. Two suggestions to feel less like a tourist. 1) Rent and apartment instead of staying in a hotel. You may think that this is extravagant but the price of a basic apartment (nothing fancy) is less per day that many 2 or 3 star hotels and many apartments can sleep a family of four much more comofortably than a hotel. 2) Walk and take the metro. Taking taxis or renting a car (traffic is a nightmare) take you away from the action. Get out and walk or mingle with the natives below ground.
Rating: 
Summary: The only book you'll need.
Review: I recently travelled to Paris with other members of my family and we found this to be the only book we needed. We'd all been fans of Rick Steves' television series even before we went on our first European trip and found that planning our vacation by his recommendations equated to a fabulous time wherever we visited. We followed his hotel recommendations in Paris and stayed at a charming hotel off the Rue Cler (and I was thrilled to discover that there was air conditioning at this hotel, as in June it became quite hot). We, and several other groups of tourists, also used his book as a guide through Versailles, reading his comments about ever room we travelled through.
Everything in his books are spot on, from how to get into the most popular attractions (while beating the rest of the tourist crowds), the anecdotes, to the history of the places you visit. The features in his book, from his hotel reviews to the language assistance will be highly helpful to travellers to Paris. His recommendations led my family and I to enjoy our time in Paris throughly and I am looking forward to going back, and to use his books again.
Rating:
Summary: Do your homework before traveling
Review: Paris, Paris, Paris... I just came back from a wonderful (and hot) trip to Europe. My best advice? Do your homework before traveling. Buy Rick Steves' books, research in advance what you want to visit and how to get there. The first thing I did in Paris was following the Montmartre walk in this book. What a wonderful surprise!. In Paris the subway takes you everywhere. Organize your calendar by blocks (2 or 3 hours) flexible enough that you can change them around in your schedule. Group activities by geographical areas (that is how the book is organized). You will save precious time and lots of "surprises". I was tempted to give the book 4 stars because some of Steves comments are silly but I skipped them and concentrated on the great tips and well organized walks described in this book. Some of my tour friends had other travel guides and Rick Steves was the best by far. In Versailles and the Louvre I found Steves' followers, everyone agreed that this book made their travel much easier.
I recommend the specific city guide instead of the Best of Europe because the later was not detailed enough and it did not include the useful "walking tours". The only thing I did not use on this book for was the hotel recommendation (because my tour company arranged the hotels). Still, this book was worth every penny I spent on it.
Rating: 
Summary: Personalized Paris
Review: Rick Steves does a good job of turning his own apparently vast travel experience into first rate guide books for the less experienced traveler. He also has a knack for converting his on-the-spot impressions into witty, sometimes ironic, one-liners. His sections on walks and tours through various parts of Paris and environs are interesting and well written. I found his tour of the Louvre especially helpful. I have let several friends borrow this volume for their trips to Paris and they all report that it helped them a lot.
Rating:
Summary: One of Rick's Best
Review: This is one of Rick Steves' best guidebooks ever. I have always used Rick's guidebooks, mainly for the excellent hotel recommendations, directions and travel tips. His books are far better than any others in these areas. For sights, however, they would often come up a bit short - understandable considering that there is a limit to how thick a guidebook should be.By limiting this guidebook to just Paris and the immediately surrounding area, Rick has the space to expand information on sights, and he makes the most of it. Sight information is reasonably in depth, to the point and often covers fascinating details omitted by others. A notable strong point is how historical information is integrated into the text rather than relegated to separate (and often little read) section. This book maintains the breezy but pithy style for which the Steves guidebooks are justly famous. Travel details provided (cost, opening and closing times, directions, nearby places to eat, etc.) are almost always spot on. When your family is hungry and crabby at the Louvre, it is comforting to to be able to open the guidebook and find there is good food court just up the stairs from the entrance to the lower level of the pyramid. Usually I use several guidebooks since each excels in a slightly different area, but there is no question that this one does it all and does it with style. This is definitely the one to buy.
Rating:
Summary: Don't make this your only book
Review: I just got back from a five day visit to Paris with my wife. After reading through several reviews, I decided to buy this book, and the Frommers guide to Paris. The absolutely *worst* thing I hated about this book were the ridiculous hand-drawn maps. All the streets were not indicated and it would be very easy to get lost past the main roads. The good thing in this book (as opposed to Frommers) was that Rick gives good explanation of the various sites that you'll be visiting. This was a boon when we were visiting Versaille, and only had a few hours. The bad thing is that he peppers the book with some awful humor which just takes up valuable print space. I bought this book as a guide, not a comedy routine! On our way to Paris, some friends gave us a Let's Go Paris booklet. The Metro map, and the Paris street map are printed on the cover. The cover is plastic coated, and was *the* most useful thing I had with me. It lasted through jackets, and jean pockets and rush hour travel. If your budget allows it, grab one. You *need* a good map. Please DO NOT depend on the maps you find in this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Very general and vague
Review: You definitely can not take just this book with you to Paris. After reading it and then the Frommer's Paris guidebook, I regret the money I wasted buying this. The pros to this book are that it is thin and therefore portable, and it has excellent Museum and tours and self-guided walks. The cons to this book are that it has few restaurant and accomodation listings(hence the thinness), and often the listings don't actually have the written down addresses, just walking directions from the Métro. Why spend more money buying this guide and the others you'll need when you can just buy one? Try buying the Frommer's or Fodor's instead.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: This guide book to Paris is OK. There are much better books on Paris. Rick Steves spends most of this book telling , in great detail, all about the museums. He hardly mentions any restaurants or hotels.
I have his books on Italy and they are much better written than this one on Paris.
I really considered sending this one back. It is really useless.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Paris Guidebook
Review: My wife and I used the Rick Steves Paris guidebook to plan our two-week honeymoon, and it literally made our trip. Some of the small restaurants he has in here are amazing! One room places with nine or ten tables, one waitress (the wife of the chef), and exquisite food at fair prices! The Rue Cler district is Rick's specialty. He knows all of the inn's and the street like the back of his hand, and after you read his tips, you will too. Rick's system of rating the sights is largely on target, and his descriptions are concise and usually on target. (BTW our favorite Paris haunt: the Rodin museum.) At one point while in the city, we thought for about 10 minutes that we had misplaced the guidebook. We nearly panicked before we found it again. If that's not the mark of a good guidebook, I don't know what is. My only request is for a better city map, but you can supplement the book with one.
Rating:
Summary: excellent guide for first trip- with these caveats
Review:  Well I just came back from Paris where the only book I took along was Rick Steves' Paris 2001, supplemented with a "Paris Pratique" map bought in a Paris bookstore (get the book, not the fold out map) and of course a subway map. For the first time visitor (and I was), this book covers the basics you need for budget trip. For a few days I was guarding the book more than my wallet, I was so dependent upon it-- it allowed me to see the highlights of the museums and sights without spending overly large amounts of time or precious physical energy. Of special help were the hints on how to avoid lines in the hot sun at the museums. The great joy of this book is it cuts monstrous sites like the Louvre down to manageable size. This convenience comes at a cost: the book reflects Rick Steves' tastes in art and food, which may not be your own. But for a first timer like me it was great. After a few days, I started to explore on my own. If the book has any faults, I would say that its recommended itineraries and guided tours focus too much on cathedrals and museums. Also, Rick fails to do with restaurants what he does so well with the sights, i.e., guide you toward a limited number of recommended/rated selections. He does recommend some places, but the "walk" maps generally don't include any of these recommended eating/drinking places, they are listed separately in the "eating" section of the book, making cross-referencing difficult. For gastronomic adventure beyond Rick's diet of croissants and cheese sandwiches, you need another book. You might try "Cheap Eats in Paris." Note, there is an excellent vegetarian restaurant at 72 Rue Lemoine. If you follow this book you will see more Americans than Parisians. Also, in every museum some of the recommended exhibits had been moved, and Rick neglected to mention "Pentecost" holiday. But these are minor objections. Overall, while I would have prioritized some of the sights differently (see below), the book was a great guide and time saver, superior to the others I looked at, and in most cases it was faster and more concise (and had better interior maps) than the audio tours and maps available at sights. I highly recommend it. Other reviews complain about the book's street maps, but I had no problem- maybe that's because I had a mini street map with me. I was never lost. Note, missing from the book entirely are: Warnings about how difficult it is to navigate the Orsay museum (what a mess-- everyone walking around lost), Day trips to Normandy Beaches (note, to truly see the D Day sites takes a few days at least) Opera Guarnier ( don't know why everyone poo-poos this as a tourist site, it had a lot of people there, it is extremely well maintained [this was how Versailles must have looked in its heyday], and once you see that and the Sewer tour you have a new appreciation of the Phantom of the Opera). Also missing from this and every other guidebook: Sites where scenes from favorite movies (American in Paris, Charade, etc.) were shot- finding these locations was a fabulous, cheap, and relatively tourist free part of the trip. A few opinions different from the book: Versailles was mildly interesting, historically important, but in my opinion overrated. I would downgrade these sites to one star each or less: Deportation Memorial (this is the one place in Paris where I felt truly unwelcome. It's not really a tourist site-- if you don't have a personal connection to it I would recommend avoiding it. It is closed 12-2, and worst of all there was a very (even for France) testy guard blowing whistles and yelling at people for not being respectful enough. The exit I took had a long flight of stairs ending at a locked gate, I had to go around and climb another flight . . . ugh) Napoleon Crypt and WWII Museum (Yawn) Conciergerie (essentially, a large basement) Rick's Champs Elysees Walk (Just like any big street downtown city street in America)-- stick to the small neighborhoods. And bring a good pair of walking shoes!
| 
