If you have bought other travel guides to Paris such as Frommer's or Fodor's, this "Irreverent Guide" will add nothing of value to your experience of Paris. It seems to me that the title is misleading and very gimmicky. Invest the ... + shipping in a good lunch for one. Or give it away to someone who needs it, or simply save it. This book is not worth it. I rate this book one star.

If being irreverent is stating that Parisian waiters can be rude, then I've missed the point of this book somewhere. Everbody KNOWS that Parisian waiters can be rude. Just be rude back!

I can't help feeling that Alexander F. Lobrano (Heidi Ellison in the first edition) have just dug around to exaggerate the things they don't like, and played down (or even omitted) the good things. For example, in a section marked 'Secret Gardens', how can Parc Andre Citroen be considered secret and Jardins Albert Kahn completely missed? It makes a mockery of claiming to be a true guide. Much better (if you're French-speaking) to get yourself a copy of 'Paris inattendu' by Michel Dansel. You get the truth AND a lot of fresh information.

I bought the Irreverent Guide to London when I traveled to Britain two years ago, and I had such a good experience with that book that I bought this one for my upcoming trip to Paris. I have also read Fodor's and have done extensive research online, but I like the irreverent book because it's small, informative, and opinionated. I don't need another sixty pages listing the museums in France. What I need is for someone knowledgable to tell me which museums are worth the time and which ones aren't

The author looks at four cities across the US in the 1980s. The most important chapter is on San Francisco. This was during the rise of the AIDS controversy. Nowadays, this chapter seems outdated. But at the time, it was quite interesting. I think urban studies majors or journalism majors may find this book quite useful.

This book presents an accurate, fair, and logical treatment of (gasp!) Reagan, SDI, and the Cold War! :P Well documented, I would recommend it to anyone who is not closed to perspectives of Reagan and other ideas frequently not expounded in the corporate media.

A minuscule section of this book questions the myth that we "spent the Soviet Union into oblivion." Though my comments neglect this book's detail concerning the subject matter, I feel obligated to present an accurate view of the book to consumers, given the previous comments below.

It is often said that the orgy of waste, fraud, and abuse that occurs in the pentagon sank the feeble USSR, creating the vibrant, uncorrupt capitalist Russia we see today. This is the "brittle" Soviet Union that survived a full scale invasion in the 40s, thoroughly devastated with a mere loss of 20 million people. Gorbachev, along with perestroika, glasnost, pulling out of Eastern Europe, et cetera, had no effect on dismantling the communist bureaucracy, since it is quite evidential that the magical powers of pork barrel spending in the United States can explain any political event that occurs in the world. :P

Nonsense, you might say? The soviet military complex grew at 1.3% per year from 75-85. It grew at 4.3% from 85-87, and Gorby brought it back to 1980 levels in 1988. Compare this to the annual 8% growth of the U.S.'s military complex at the time. Only 8% of the soviet defense budget was allocated to offensive strategic weapons, so the inane comment that the soviet union "believed it!" leaves much to be desired, given that they didn't even attempt to keep up. Conservatives like to point out Gorbachev's comments about the pernicious effects of the soviet military complex. With weirdness, the same logic does not apply to the United States.

Conservatives at that time were OPENLY critical and quite horrified that Reagan would be so "soft" with dealing with Gorby's "PR campaign." Conservatives were the last ones to realize that real change was occuring in the USSR. This is quite ironic, and cannot just be swept away by revisionism from the right.

Also ignore the polling data from the early 80s -- the nuclear freeze movement had 70% support, 66% thought Reagan was doing a bad job on arms control, and 57% were worried that Reagan would involve us in a nuclear war. Star Wars, and its crusade against these "terrible weapons," altered the perception of the Reagan from warmonger to peacemaker.

Oh, I almost forgot -- ABMS is pure pork, an insult to the taxpayer. The Aug1999 issue of Scientific American sums it up clearly --despite the huge cost of ABMS, it can be easily overcome by efforts to overwhelm the defense, hindering warhead idenfication and detection, and the myriad of methods that exist that can prevent the interceptor from hitting the warhead. (SLCMs, chaff, decoys, cooled shrouds, etc....)

Here is my primary criticism of this book. The modern pentagon is subservient to the will of defense contractors, when it should be to national security. This is a formidable problem I challenge conservatives to address, rather than adopt the propaganda line. Pick up any book on corporate wealthfare to understand what I mean. Campaign finance reform, and its antithesis, legalized bribery, play a major role in this mess as well. Simon&Schuster is a subsidiary of Viacom, the CBS-Westinghouse amalgam. Does this have anything to do with the content? I am not certain. Despite the lack of emphasis on obvious questions (e.g. Shultz and Weinberger were executives at the defense contractor Bechtel Corporation, which did massive engineering projects for the military and foreign clients such as Saudi Arabia.. did this play a role? She did not even touch the revolving door between military contractors and government personnel) -- I give this book a thumb up.

First.....don't listen to any right-wing types who try to portray Frances Fitzgerald as some sort of liberal hack. Second.....buy this book and read it. "Way Out There in the Blue" is an amazingly detailed and straightforward discussion of the Reagan Administration and its foreign policy, specifically in regard to nuclear weapons, anti-missle defense, and strategic arms limitation. While it is true that Fitzgerald has no love for throwing money away on unproven and impractical defense schemes, the book is a fascinating depiction of the chaos and back-stabbing within the Reagan Administration, an administration in which policy advisors were left to make policy and defend their turf because the president would not or could not assert any leadership. As John Sears has said, Reagan's detachment gave his staff enormous powers. "You could do almost anything you wanted and you didn't have to check with anybody. You could do all these amazing things...Reagan wasn't involved...." Although different in focus, this book is far superior to Morris' "Dutch" in its grasp of the real Ronald Reagan.

Third, the depictions of Ronald Reagan (despite what his worshippers on the Right may claim) are not those of Fitzgerald, but are the commentaries made by those within the Reagan Administration itself, the people who had to work intimately with him and had to deal with the frustrations of having no leadership at the top. For example; "I had never known anyone so unable to deal with close personal conflict." (Michael Deaver) "There's a generation gap between what Reagan thinks he knows about the world and the reality. His is a kind of 1952 world. He sees the world in black and white terms." (John Sears) "There were a lot of ideal worlds in Reagan's mind, and sometimes he lived in them." (John Sears) In regard to policy decisions, Reagan would say, "That's your business. I'm out here selling it. You tell me." (John Sears) "It's very unusual to have a president who is not interested in policy at all." (Henry Kissinger) "I went all through this reasoning, but he did not understand my investment strategy. For him the idea of anti-missle defenses had an appeal in itself. My own concepts for leveraging Soviet behavior were lost on him." (Robert McFarlane) "I feel you people are leading the president out on a limb." (George Shultz) "Reagan totally believed in the science-fiction solution he had proposed without consultation with his secretary of state or his secretary of defense...." (Lou Cannon) "He was never the initiator." (Helene von Damn) "He made no demands, and gave almost no instructions. Essentially, he just responded to whatever was brought to his attention.... At times he would just change the subject, maybe tell a funny story...." (Martin Anderson) Reagan "chose his aides and then followed their advice almost without question. He listened, acquiesced, played his role and waited for the next act to be written." (Donald Regan) "An imperceptible bobbing of Reagan's head was supposed to mean that he was pleased with a point, while a slight tightening of the mouth was considered a sign of disapproval. [The staff was left to guess] "whether or not he had any opinion-or any thought-at all." (Lou Cannon) Reagan was "among the least analytical and most unread of presidents." (Lou Cannon) When Les Aspin asked Ken Adelman who spoke for the administration, his answer was, "Everyone." Poindexter had told Reagan so many different stories that "this sort of confused the Presidential mind as to what he could say and couldn't say...." (Donald Regan)

Well, one could quote endlessly like this, but this is not the point. The point is, read this book. You will find it a fascinating look at the end of the Cold War and the various positions staked out over nuclear weapons and anti-missle systems...worth understanding as the George W administration is reviving it big time. It is, at the same time, a fascinating look at the mind of President Reagan and the mind-sets of his advisors that helps dispel the Right-wing myths surrounding his administration. This is so timely because most of the characters are still around...including Richard Perle who has re-surfaced in the George W Administration. Five stars without question.

A well researched and well documented study that raises vital and distrubing questions about Ronald Reagan, American government, presidential decision making, and by way of extension, American democracy. The book stands on its own merits, which are considerable. For those who have difficulty accepting some of the disclosures about the Gipper I suggest a foray into the footnotes which Fitzgerald had generously provided throughout. It is to be hoped that Fitzgerald's book is the first in a long line of works which will attempt to relate the extraordinary and rapid cognitive decline of Reagan throughout his presidency with some of the most important events of his presidency.

Among the questions raised by a thoughtful reading of Fitzgerald are the following: How did this country survive a president who frequently confused his films with his own life, even after it was pointed out to him that he was wrong, who on occasion did not recognize his own children, who believed that he had personally participated in the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and who on one public occasion stunned an audience with the question: "What would the world be like if World War II had actually happened." It is significant that up to the moment that Reagan started to repeat verbatim sections of a speech he had just given, on international television, that is, at the opening of the Reagan library in California, that the family noticed that he was slipping. For decades up to that point Reagan had been protected and choreographed by the most expert political advisors and spindoctors who ever surrounded a president. Tragically, rather than the first sign of Alzheimer's disease Reagan's public performance at the opening of his library may have been one of the last and unavoidable signs.

There is therefore a great deal of hope in Fitzgerald's remarkable book. Any country that can survive the kind of leadership that Reagan brought to this country has real strengths. The bad news is that we are not out of the woods yet, given Clinton-Morris's policy of "hugging the opposition" and bringing to fruition many of the more harebrained foreign and domestic plans of the Reagan years.

Fitzgerald's remarkable book is truly essential for anyone who wishes to make sense of the American performance during the last two decades of the twentieth century.