Moon Metro Los Angeles: Unfold the City (Paperback)
Product Description
Travelers will behold all that the City of Angels contains with the hip Moon Metro Los Angeles. This sleek guide profiles the best of the city, combining selective listings of the hottest sights, shops, restaurants, amusements, and hotels with discreet, laminated, fold-out maps detailing all the must-see neighborhoods. Vacationers can visit the nightlife of the Sunset Strip, stroll down Venice Beach, catch a movie at Mann’s Chinese Theatre, or catch a view of the sun setting over the Pacific from the Santa Monica Pier. Moon Metro Los Angeles leads the visitor to the city?s top sights as well as the places only the locals know about. Clean, concise, and compact, Moon Metro Los Angeles is the definitive guide to the city of dreams.
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On a recent visit to LA, I needed an easy-to-use resource just to get my bearings around this expansive and convoluted city. This led to my purchase of the Moon Metro guide, which is as sleek a handbook as one could envision for the visiting tourist. In my subsequent and constant usage of the book, I became increasingly disenchanted with the fragmentation of its presentation, as its editors focus on nine selected tourist areas rather than looking at the city from a navigational standpoint. On the plus side, the guidebook starts with helpful fold-out maps of the nine areas with key attractions identified and located. The nine areas are Santa Monica/Venice, Westwood/UCLA, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood/Melrose, La Brea/Fairfax, Hollywood, Los Feliz/Silverlake, Downtown/Little Tokyo/Chinatown, and further afield, Pasadena.
The rest of the book consists of listings within those areas under the sections - sights, restaurants, nightlife, shops, art and leisure, and hotels. The trendy and well-trodden are included but also some interesting idiosyncratic recommendations like the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust on Wilshire. However, the parts ultimately do not add up to a useful whole, at least for anyone looking for a more cohesive view of the city. If you want to go to any attraction outside of the areas, for example, the Huntington Library, Universal Studios or the Getty Center, you may find mention of them in some generalized map or not at all.
More problematic is how there is little guidance given on using the freeways or major thoroughfares to get from one area to the other. Unlike New York, LA is a city of scattered jewels very often separated by miles and miles of congested roadway. It seems the format of the Moon Metro guide is more conducive to more urbanized spaces whose attractions are within walking and subway commuting distances. Granted the book is a nice portable size, but you will still need to purchase an extensive city map and likely a more comprehensive tourbook of the area to make sure you take the most advantage of your trip to LA.
This book really helped while my husband and I went to L.A. for a vacation. The book has highlighted the most interesting areas of the city and made the ciy managable. Each highlighted area has its own fold out map with places to see and things to do. This is a great feature for driving around the city because you don’t have a huge map to deal with (so chances are you won’t wreck the rental car). Each highlighted area has infomation and a bit of history provided. The book also has pages in the back with detailed descriptions of interesting sites, resturants, hotels, etc. This book helps the tourist explore one area at a time. I highly recommend this book, and the metro moon series for the traveler.