City Hopping

A good travel guide must be more than merely informative. It should be readable before, during and after a trip and evocative enough to serve as a wish book. Three new guides pleasantly meet these conditions:

PARIS PLACES AND PLEASURES -by Kafe Simon. 327 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Kate Simon has already written excellent books on New York and Mexico, and Paris is even better. The chapters on hotels, restaurants, neighborhoods, entertainment and landmarks are complete and reliable. The section on shopping moves up and down the streets, number by number. Even better than these conscientious compilations are brief essays on Parisian institutions and habits, sights and sounds. On the Paris radio: "You might hear a physics lecture surrounded by splinters of electronic music, or a description of the circumcision rites of remote African tribes described by a dry, rustling voice like the crumbling of yellowed paper." On the city's famed markets in the fall: "Rows of hare--gray, attenuated Gothic sculptures--cling to the portals of butcher shops, flanked by pheasants whose brilliant tail feathers swing and whip in the breeze."

A SWINGER'S GUIDE TO LONDON by Piri Halasz. 207 pages. Coward-McCann. $3.95.

London, more than Paris, is where the action is these days, and this pocket-size volume concentrates on the action. It avoids taxing the mind or the arches with museums, historical monuments and other cultural shrines. Instead, there is selective advice on how to establish oneself as a temporary Londoner: what newspapers and magazines to buy, which names to drop, when to be at which pubs or discotheques, and how to attack in the ticket-buying, reservation-cadging, club-crashing wars. The author, a TIME contributing editor who also wrote the April 15, 1966, cover story on swinging London, organizes her advice to help a hurried city hopper utilize all his time and energies among the mods and minis and their elders, who have lately turned London into a new kind of resort capital.

THE NEW YORK SPY edited by A/an R/nz/er. 440 pages. David White. $6.

The 26 articles that make up this book are also aimed more at the swinger than the history hound, but they are chattier and more discursive. Written by hardened New York novelists and journalists, they cover the town with a cynical gallantry and inverse snobbery typical of the big-city provincial. This prevailing tone accounts for both the strengths and weaknesses of the book. It is authentic--mirroring the New Yorker's romance with artistic success and mechanical failure, Jewishness, the infallibility of cab drivers and elevator men, the superiority of Manhattan parks, ghettos and delicatessens. Tom Wolfe, a Yale Ph. D. in American Studies who has become a kind of Boswell of hip New York, contributes a scathing parody of a stranger's introduction to the city; a poet, George Dickerson, produces a remarkably prosaic, candid analysis of New York women. Occasionally, local color shifts into caricature, and the book is too breezy and cranky to serve as a visitor's only guide. It is fine as a complement to Kate Simon's New York Places and Pleasures.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.