The Rough Guide to Southwest USA 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Greg Ward

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The Rough Guide to Southwest USA 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Chicago Travel Books

The Rough Guide to Southwest USA 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Greg Ward
Price: $14.95

Features

Paperback: 612 pages

Publisher: Rough Guides; 4th edition October 2, 2006

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1843536838

ISBN-13: 978-1843536833

Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds

Product Description
Comprehensively covering New Mexico & Arizona, and stretching into some highly visited parts of Nevada (Las Vegas) and Southwest Colorado (Mesa Verde National Park), the Rough Guide to Southwest USA covers the region not just as a collection of states but both in the manner people tend to visit and by defining what the Southwest means. The area is one of the great road trip destinations in America, full of scenic national parks, unusual geological formations, unique cities like Santa Fe, vintage Americana, and Wild West towns. There are great features on Southwest movie locations, native peoples, adobe architecture and the like, and plenty of practical details and descriptions for hikes and other outdoor activities.

Reader Reviews
I recently made a road trip across the American Southwest and purchased both the Lonely Planet 4th Edition (December 2005) and the Rough Guide 4th Edition (October 2006) as my guides for the week-long adventure. The Rough Guide, while still far above Frommer's or a Mobile guide, just does not compare to the Lonely Planet guide. This Rough Guide is oversized (nearly twice as thick as its competitor), but doesn't offer any significant additional information for all that bulk. The author has a clear distaste for the Southwest, referring to the desolation and hum-drum nature of many of the Southwest outpost towns. Clearly, anyone buying this book already chose to spend time in the Southwest, so the haughty attitude about what could possibly carry a visitor to certain towns, or about the availability of only chain motels, wears thin fast. The big selling point of the Rough Guide is the additional historical and contextual information provided along the journey. For example, I learned that Smokey Bear does not, in fact, have "the" in the middle of his name, and one is best to remember that before visiting Capitan, New Mexico. The guide also has hundreds of black and white photos scattered throughout the text, some of dubious utility to the reader.

The Rough Guide to Southwest USA 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)
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Price: $14.95
Updated on 10-31-2008.