Fodor's CITYGUIDE Houston, 1st Edition : The Ultimate Sourcebook for City Dwellers

Rating:
Summary: The best Houston guidebook SO FAR...
Review: As a visitor, I found Houston to be an amazing, sprawling, quirky, fascinating city. Practically impossible to navigate-- the road maps seem to be printed upside down! Thus any guidebook has its work cut out for it. What I liked about this one, however, was it's enthusiasm. It seems to have been written by people who really love their city and are trying to convey some of the local flavor. It does try to be both a tourist's AND a resident's guide, but the casual visitor may not notice or be bothered by the misinformation and typos that upset my fellow reviewer. I particularly like the clean, modern design and the system of indicating where on the map grid the various places are located. At least this gives one a CLUE!

Rating:
Summary: Hope the next edition is much better
Review: Proceed with *much* caution if you are are depending on this book to give you up-to-date, accurate information in its listings. While this book has some good information, it is absolutely rife with errors in both the text and maps it contains. I can open the book to almost any page and find erroneous information in one form or another. Some of these errors could have been caught with a good proofreading job, while other of these errors *should* have been caught by the author(s) and/or editor with the slightest fact-checking effort, and other of these errors are just glaring problems with the book. For instance, there are several different listings and mentions of places that have been closed for at least two years (this book was just published in April 2001). There are also many inexcusable omissions. I give this book 1 star because there really is some good information in it (if you can tell which listings don't have gross errors). If only more of the information in this book were accurate and more complete, and appeared less likely to have come from the weekend section of the newspaper. However, the amount of errors and omissions casts a very negative, "proceed with extreme caution" pall over the book. I consider this product defective and wish you luck in navigating the minefield of errors it contains.