South Korea (Insight Guides) Paperback – December 1, 2013

Way to thick and way too wordy to be an effective travel guide. As one of the other reviewers mention, it's fine as a coffee table book but not that useful as a travel guide. A good travel guide should have multiple maps, key locations, how to travel to destination, sights, etc. all organized succinctly and in a well organized fashion. This book does not do that. Unfortunately there are not too many alternatives for South Korea, in particular for locations outside of Seoul, but the Lonely Planet and Top 10 Seoul guides are decent.

I have found this book and all the other travel guides I have purchased from Insight Guides to be informative and current. I was given another travel guide as a present. I attempted to use it and found myself lost in Seoul searching for places which I eventually found out were nonexistent. I love this book and still use it now even after 8 months of living in South Korea.

This is a great travel guide with lots of pictures and helpful information. I looked at quite a few guides for S. Korea and this one was the best. I don't like guides with too much text, photos are always more helpful for me. Also had a lot of great information on history and culture. Would recommend this to anyone interested in visiting S. Korea.

I've been an avid user of the Lonely Planet Guide books and I've traveled a lot. But I wanted to try a different guide and this one was recently put on the shelves. (bonus for most recent guide book about South Korea) If you have time to read about the area before you go then this book might help. I found it only slightly helpful once I was there and could understand what they were referring to. The maps aren't very good and I opened this book maybe 3 times while I was there only to be frustrated with the lack of direction. All the important information is in the back and even that wasn't so great. I simply didn't have time to sit and read paragraph after paragraph, I wanted to be out exploring with a guide that would give me some history and quick tips. I found the internet and the subway map of Seoul to be more helpful. That said, pretty book, nice pictures, wordy.

This book is one of the better tourist books for South Korea. It gives a good balance of pictures and text so you can flip through it really fast to find things instead of having to read through everything. It was so good I bought another to give to a friend!

Good book for south Korea.

This was a Christmas present for my Grandson. He could hardly put it down. I am very pleased and so was he..

Beautiful photos and good information

This is very deserving of the name 'Insight Guide'. It gives a good background on Korea's history as well as giving insight into the culture. The different provinces each have a section describing the important sights and things to do. If you want a bit of an understanding of Korea as well as recommendations for a good itinerary then I'd certainly recommend this book.

Lovely book.

Le Insight Guides sono per me un mix di guida turistica discreta, ma con tante belle foto. Trovo queste guide molto buone per conoscere e vedere in anteprima (le foto) quanto si vuole visitare, ritengo non siano molto utili per trovare alberghi, ristoranti o altre informazioni più "pratiche".La qualità della carta usata è molto buona, le foto si vedono molto bene ma per contro sono parecchio pesanti quando si fanno viaggi.

my favorite of all travel books on Korea

Awesome book