Word: guidebook
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That one-star, one-line rating for the Weinhaus Maternus in the Michelin German guidebook is somewhat coy, albeit accurate as far as it goes. The service, as Michelin indicates, is indeed gemütlich and the food good. Eating there is also reasonable: a dinner for two can be had for $12. What the guidebook fails to mention is that Maternus, located in the Bonn suburb of Bad Godesberg* is undoubtedly the most important restaurant in West Germany. Its primary bill of fare is politics, not Sauerbraten, and as the capital's gathering place for party leaders, deputies...
Even a tourist-class guidebook-the kind written in hoked-up feature writer's prose-furnishes vicarious travel. Letters from Iceland is a first-class VIP travel book written by two poets; it provides not only the usual armchair transport but also a vicarious voyage into the past...
...their few weeks spent getting saddle sores on bad-tempered Icelandic ponies or in rattletrap buses on boulder-paved roads, eating terrible meals of smoked mutton in smokier hovels, Auden and MacNeice re-created an odd and magical journey compounded of poems (satirical, epistolatory and familiar), letters, guidebook information, parodies, private jokes and public protest...
...Guidebook's humor ever sags, that insider's advice, as glossy as the cover, just keeps zipping along. The inquisitive high school senior learns that Penn calls its abnormal psychology course "Nuts and Sluts." Harvard calls informal dinner talks in the Houses "tables," and Princeton calls university cops "proctors." (If that's the inside dope, I'll go to CCNY, thanks...
WITH A BOOK that needs every friend it can get, the Ivy Guidebook naturally refuses to pass a critical judgment on any of the Ivy schools. Behind all the faces and jokes, somewhere, sometime, I think I expected to see some sort of qualitative distinction made between one college and the next...