1001 Historic Sites You Must See Before You Die [Hardcover]

Richard Cavendish (Editor), Koichiro Matsuura (Preface)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008

Both casual travelers and dedicated history buffs will relish this visitor's guide to palaces, cathedrals, temples, battlefields, homes of great artists and statesmen--places and monuments that bear witness to thousands of years of human history. Packed with vivid color photos and detailed textual entries 1001 Historic Sites carries its readers off to places that include:

Prehistoric Sites: Stonehenge, England; the Lescaux Cave Paintings, France, and others

Battlefields: Waterloo, Belgium; Gettysburg, U.S.A.; Hastings, England; Ypres, Belgium, and others

Buildings and Monuments: St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow; Nishi Hogan-Ji (Buddhist temple), Kyoto, Japan; St. Paul's Cathedral, London; the Eiffel Tower, Paris; the Empire State Building, New York City; the Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy; the Wailing Wall, Jerusalem; the Pyramids, Egypt; and many others

Homes of the Famous and Infamous: Mozart's Birthplace, Salzburg, Austria; Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, England; Jane Austen's home, Chawton, England; Hitler's retreat at Berchtesgaden, near Munich, Germany; and many others

1001 Historic Sites makes a great book for browsing, an idea-packed source for vacation planning, a handy reference volume for students of history, and a sheer pleasure for the general reader.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this thick travel guide, Cavendish, a veteran travel writer and columnist for History Today magazine, assigns readers enough must-see agendas to fill several lifetimes. Well-organized by region and graced with thorough historical descriptions of each locale, this volume's impressive range incorporates everything from typical tourist destinations like Westminster Abbey, the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China, as well as unusual spots like the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, Guinness Brewery in Dublin, and the Mercedes-Benz Factory in Stuttgart, Germany. What's missing is the information a tourist would need actually to visit these sites: directions, hours of operation, and other handy tips are overlooked. Probably too heavy handed for a casual tourist, this guide would be most useful for the experienced traveler or history buff.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

From the Kirkus Reviews Feature interview with Richard Cavendish:




It begins in Dawson

City, a small town

in Canada that

birthed the Klondike

Gold Rush. It ends

with the imposing

stone heads that dominate

Easter Island's

Rapa Nui National

Park. In between, armchair explorers will

find almost 1,000 pages of stunning photographs

and evocative thumbnail sketches of

the world's greatest historical sites.

"It was

absolutely desperate," says historian Richard

Cavendish of his daunting commission to

choose the attractions that would make the

cut.

"When I drew up the original contents list

and set off cheerfully on this job, I realized

that 1,001 places is a hell of a lot of places

when you're trying to write them all down.

We tried to spread them all around the world

to the extent that we could and tried

to make them as varied as possible so they

weren't all stately homes and churches."



Many of the sites correspond to UNESCO's

851 World Heritage Sites, and the book

earned a preface and high praise from Koïchiro

Matsuura, the organization's director

general.

It's a doorstop-sized volume, but

one Cavendish hopes will prove a valuable

resource to travelers around the globe.

"This

isn't a book that anyone will sit down and

read from start to finish," he says. " I think it's

a book that you dip into from time to time

when it's nice to look at a few more entries.

The ideal outcome is that someone reads an

entry and thinks, 'Gosh, that's somewhere

that I would really like to see for myself. ' "


—Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2008



"Here's a vacation challenge: Visit as many historical sites as you can. If you can't get there by train, plane or boat, let your fingers do the walking through the 960 pages of this colorful, insightful book."


—Carol Parker, The Tampa Tribune, March 23, 2008

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 960 pages
• Publisher: Barron's Educational Series; First USA and Canada edition, stated edition (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764160443
• ISBN-13: 978-0764160448
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.4 x 2.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #431,165 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Major oversights hamper enjoyment, September 22, 2008

By 

wolfgang731 - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: 1001 Historic Sites You Must See Before You Die (Hardcover)

I love this series and normally give it a very wide berth and tend not to take it too seriously but rather regard it as a fun tool that provides a good starting off point. However, and with respect to the U.S. alone, the oversights are so glaring that I felt a need to add my two cents. When we're dealing with a country that in comparison with Europe and Asia that have two or three millennia's worth of history to draw back on, is so young that the TRULY historical places would seem obvious and somewhat limited, such exclusions are really inexcusable. Yes, most of the usual suspects are here, but check out those that were omitted. In no particular order:

Valley Forge

Independence Hall

Old North Church

St. Augustine Colonial Spanish Quarter & Castillo San Marco / Ft. Matanzas

Colonial Williamsburg

Ft. McHenry

French Quarter / Jackson Square & St. Louis Cathedral

Jefferson Memorial

The National Archives

Harvard University

House of the Seven Gables

Biltmore Estate

New York Stock Exchange

Salem Witch Museum

Ground Zero (Site of the World Trade Center)

Bunker Hill

Savannah Historic District

Falling Waters

Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Grant's Tomb

...to name a few. In their place, we get the following...

City Lights Bookstore

Disneyland

Universal Studios

Union Station - Los Angeles

Eastern State Penitentiary

Japanese Internment Camps

Kit Carson's Home

Virginia City

Golden Spike Historic Site

Grumman's Chinese Theatre

Forest Lawn Memorial Parks

Stonewall Inn

I'm not implying that the aforementioned, which were, in fact, included in the book, are not in their own right historic, because they are. But to leave out places such as Independence Hall, where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were signed or Ft. McHenry, the place that inspired The Star Spangled Banner or Ground Zero, the site of the most monumental act of terrorism on U.S. soil or the historic center and fortifications of the oldest European settlement in what is the now the United States is just way too much to allow to go by without comment. Again, I take these publications with a grain of salt but when it's no longer a grain but rather a boulder, then heaving it over my shoulder isn't quite as easy.

Mind you, I'm focusing exclusively on the U.S. No doubt glaring omissions are not limited exclusively to said country.

2.0 out of 5 stars Shallow Overview, June 8, 2011

By 

Blue Eagle (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 1001 Historic Sites You Must See Before You Die (Hardcover)

My main problem with this book is that the entries for the US & Canada are so badly written; 'this is an important building'; 'this conveys the history of...' The book improves once it reaches Europe because it has more to work with, but it could have been much better.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, January 25, 2009

By 

Bernard Zimmerman "operabuff" (Central New Jersey) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: 1001 Historic Sites You Must See Before You Die (Hardcover)

I am still enjoying this great book. Plenty of photographs to show the special places, along with good commentary and descriptions. Worthwhile guide book for world traveler.