All stories about "Guidebooks"

"Le Grand Véfour. Maxim's. La Table de Joël Robuchon. None of these venerated restaurants are on Alexander Lobrano's list of the 102 best in Paris. And that's one of the reasons I love his new paperback Hungry for Paris: The Ultimate Guide to the City's 102 Best Restaurants. Lobrano, the European correspondent for Gourmet magazine, has lived here and written about food for 22 years, so he's qualified to call those behemoths overrated. Which establishments do hit the mark?"

Thomas Kohnstamm, the travel guide writer who made headlines recently after an Australian newspaper reported that he "plagiarised and made up large sections of his books," may not be the liar that many in the media (including yours truly) have made him out to be. I emailed with Kohnstamm this week to get his side of the story and he says he wasn't as dishonest as the press firestorm makes it seem. He claims the interview that sparked so much controversy took his statements out of context. Since Kohnstamm still does admit to cutting some corners in his work for guidebook publisher Lonely Planet, I'd take his claims with a grain of salt, but in the interests of fairness, I'm repeating them here.

Over the weekend, travel guide publisher Lonely Planet was rocked by revelations that one of their writers lied, plagiarized, and dealt drugs while working for the company. The writer, a 32 year-old named Thomas Kohnstamm, gave an interview to Australia's Daily Telegraph newspaper, in which he admitted to making up large sections of Lonely Planet guides to Latin America and the Caribbean. Kohnstamm claims that, in one case, he didn't even travel to the country he was assigned to write about. He says he wrote the Lonely Planet guidebook for Colombia while in San Francisco, where he got information about the country "from a chick I was dating" who worked at the Consulate.

Thanks to a smooth move by Lonely Planet, rather than having to buy entire guidebooks, you can now pick and choose the particular chapters of titles that you'd like to buy and download them as PDFs. "Much like the 100-calorie pack phenomenon in the snack industry, there's a premium to be paid for smaller portions here," says Jaunted. But if you're solely looking for something specific, the new structure may also help you save a bit of dough . . . in addition to perhaps being a little nicer to the environment. [Jaunted]