Reviews for Open Road's Best of Provence and the French Riviera: Your Passport to the Perfect Trip! and Includes One-Day, Weekend, One-Week and Two-Week Trips

The average rating for Open Road's Best of Provence and the French Riviera: Your Passport to the Perfect Trip! and Includes One-Day, Weekend, One-Week and Two-Week Trips based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-01 00:00:00 Nicholas Heathcote It's always hard to assign ratings to collections with multiple authors. I don't want to shortchange the good ones or overrate the bad ones. There are twenty-five pieces in this book. Twenty of them are worth reading. Skip the other five, and the book rates four stars. The following five are just not worth reading. In some of them, the authors hopped in the sack with a guy the same day they met him, then spent the rest of their time in France bemoaning the fact that the guy used them and dumped them. In others the topic is so self-referential that there's very little about France itself in the piece. So skip these five: Digging Dordogne Paris Noir Andre Liberte Paris Lip (I don't know why they insist on including Ayun Halliday's pieces in these collections!) The pieces I enjoyed the most really gave me a feeling for what makes France so essentially French, whether it be the food, the people, the countryside, or the language. My favorite five pieces: Madame Michel The Source of the Seine (some good humor) Searching for Cepes Beaujolais Nouveau (LOL) Food to which Aunt Pauline and Lady Godiva led us (by Alice B. Toklas about France during WWI. Interesting perspective.) All other pieces I enjoyed to varying degrees. If you've been to France you'll probably enjoy the book even more than I did, never having visited.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-02 00:00:00 Dolgos János I meant to read this before my recent trip to France but it served as a nice reminder of my short time there. The 'Love' in the title not only refers to relationships with significant others, but to love of food and wine, country, and culture. There's a nice sampling of writers from different time periods and genres; for example, early writers such as Alice B. Toklas and M.F.K. Fisher, and writers as recent as Ayun Halliday and Ruth Reichl.