These two smaller volumes, a perfect fit for a pocket or pocketbook, are by first four and then five Shanghai expatriate professional women: Barbara Green, Tess Johnston, Ruth Lear, and Carolyn Robertson, with Jos Snoodijk contributing to the second guide book. (The first book is a reprint of one that sold out shortly after publication in 2007.)
These fact-filled guides are generously illustrated with photographs by the authors (Book I) and again by Deke Erh (Book II), and feature detailed fold-out maps with the routes and highlights of all twelve walks. At the beginning of each walk are instructions on how to reach the starting point by foot, car, or public transport. And lest the walker get weary or hungry along the way, the authors have thoughtfully provided the addresses of comfortable coffee shops and restaurants (including the location of toilets!) at suitable intervals along the routes.
The narratives are not only detailed, with street numbers and orientation, but spin a lively tale of what life was like -- and often even who lived it -- in the buildings that you pass. One chapter features the homes and offices of communist heroes of the revolution, another the homes and haunts of privileged foreigners and Chinese. The locations cover almost every area of old Shanghai, from the fashionable French Concession and the businessmen's International Settlement, through the native city (sometimes called Yu Yuan after its famous garden) and the ex-settlement territory, to the less prosperous (even today) area north of Suzhou Creek. Not many areas of Shanghai have been overlooked by these intrepid walker-historians.
Shanghai is vividly layed out for the walker (and even for the idle reader) in words and colored images that open to them the avenues and lanes that crisscross this tumultuous city of the past and present.