Tokyo

Rating:
Summary: A book for no one. Detestable.
Review: There seems to be more quotations in this book than original text, and half of them deal with London or Paris! There is no structure to the book: it is one continuous chapter very poorly written at that. The author makes an assertion in one paragraph only to contradict himself in the next.
But the worst is not so much the style as the content. In this book, we "learn" that the Japanese are dirty (p.57), that they all look alike (p. 72), that they are like children (p. 88).
I was extremely dissapointed. People who have lived fifty years in a place are usually able to convey something about it. This is not the case here. There seems to be no redeeming value about Tokyo. This is something with which I disagree, having myself lived there for more than ten years.
This is not a book for people who would like to visit and not for people who have been there.
This is a book for no one.

Rating:
Summary: interesting observations
Review: This is a different type of travel book, less filled with first person stories or dialogues but full of anthropological, architectural, historical & social observations of Tokyo. The author lived in Japan for over 50 years and is obviously fond of Japanese culture. The book gives a sense of what the life is like in Tokyo (as much as one can gather from reading a book).