Customer Reviews

The Traveler's Atlas: A Global Guide to the Places You Must See in your Lifetime

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the book I was looking for to give my mother for Christmas. I wanted something about world travel, with beautiful pictures, descriptions of places, and geological maps. This book has that and more.

In addition to these things, the book has a sidebar of facts on each place, summarizing climate, local language, currency, best time to go, health concerns and other useful information. There is also a world climate map in the front of the book which labels each area covered in the book.

The photography is excellent and I think the coverage is fairly well-rounded. The book opens with information on Banff National Park in Canada, proceeds around the globe in a more or less eastward direction and finishes in the Pacific with Tahiti and Easter Island.

A large spectrum of travel is covered, but there are some notable places missing. The authors left out some great cities in Europe, although they do cover Venice, Prague, Vienna and Krakow. These are all beautiful cities and deserve their place in this book, but absent are Paris, Rome, Athens, and London. It's easy enough to find books on these places though and I suspect the authors overlooked them for this reason.

One place conspicously absent, which I cannot forgive them for overlooking is the Caribbean. I may be biased, but I do think the Caribbean is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Any well-traveled soul must see at least one of the islands of the Greater or Lesser Antilles.

In spite of this, I still give the book 4 stars and feel that it is a wonderful place to look for travel ideas or to do some world exploration from the comfort of an easy chair.

The authors set forth the 47 places you must see in your lifetime. They make a good case for each place and the pictures are great. There are some surprises in this list-like the Flaming Cliffs of the Gobi Desert. After reading this book I booked trips to the West coast of Norway and Kenya and Tanzania. (41 more places to go) I would be interested in hearing from anyone trying to visit all 47 places. I cannot say enough good things about this book. I have a hundred or so travel books and this is by far my favorite. It also makes a great gift.

There's no doubt that this is a beautiful book. How disappointing, then, that it could have been so much more beautiful were it not for the largely useless guidebook-style writing. What I had hoped for was a gorgeous photo-essay to inspire my future travels with places in the world that are not to be missed. What I got was a book with a split personality: one, a handsome book that belongs on a coffee table, the other, an overly ambitious guidebook to the world with no depth and mediocre writing. If only the authors had chosen one personality to go with (preferably the coffee table one), it might've worked. The problem with the guidebook strategy is that no one is going to use this as a guidebook-the dimensions, hardcover binding, and shallowness of content make that impossible. Therefore this information goes to waste, and the sacrifices that it requires, such as having text in every margin instead of full-page pictures, do the book much damage.

That the suggested places tend to be overly broad is a significant weakness. Amazingly, one of the featured places is actually the entire state of Florida. Not that Florida isn't lovely, but such a broad notion of a must-see place is hardly compelling to me as a traveler-It's not like I haven't heard of Florida before, and it doesn't give me any new ideas or highlight anything is sufficient depth to make it seem exciting. This lack of focus pervades the book, as the cities of Vienna, Prague and Warsaw are lumped together as another single destination. Still, despite these shortcomings, I do enjoy looking through the book. The selection of places are varied and well distributed around the world, and some of the photos really are breath taking, and so on the coffee table it remains.

This book sets forth the 47 places that you must visit in your lifetime. I am working on visitng all 47 places. Since I first reviewed the book some three years ago, my wife and I have visited six of the places--Tanzania, the west coast of Norway-the world's most beatiful voyage, Costa Rica, the Great Wall of China, the Yangtze Gorges and the Outer Hebrides. This is a wonderful book and makes a great gift.

"The Traveler's Atlas" is a fresh and informative volume.

For author John Man, the true purpose of travel is not only "to see, experience, feel, and understand distant places," but to "gain a deeper knowledge of home, one's culture, of oneself."

Through lucid prose and colorful photographs, Man takes us to places that, were we never to set foot on them, we "would remain impoverished" beings.

How gloriously right Man reads when he speaks about the stunning beauty of, say, Banff National Park (Canada); certain regions of Florida; Venice; and the grand Aurlandsfjord in Norway.

But Mexico City? Even Man has to admit that given that the city is perhaps the most polluted metropolis in the world, it is "not to everyone's taste."

Besides his engaging essays on each location, Man thoughtfully includes a Fact File, which lists, among other things, Climate; Tourist Season; Nearest Airport; and Best Time to Visit.

And in the back of the book, there's a very helpful Directory of Useful Addresses.

I am disappointed by this book. The paper quality does not do justice to the photos. Colors and defintion are washed out. Furthermore, while I only skimmed through the book I noticed several typos.

I was also surprised to see the Taj Mahal and Hong Kong and a lot of other very cool places ommitted, while Florida (!) was included.

This is a nice coffee table book, but leaves out the vast majority of South America. I could not believe Rio de Janeiro and other major places where not listed. Could be a bit more extensive.

This book has a very specific purpose. It's a good book for browsing and doing some quick and interesting couch traveling to places with nice scenery and thats about it. I would not recommend it as a reference. So I'm not sure that "The Traveler's Atlas" is really a good title. But I guess I would have gone with it over the more honest "Some Interesting and Pretty Places a Few People Visited and Researched".

It nicely highlights and handful of beautiful areas of the world and gives a thorough 2-3 page description of the experience of visiting there and the history. However, the places seem to be chosen based on their scenery alone. So if you're looking for events or cultures, they don't come up too often. Some locations are streotypical "Places you must see" and some aren't as obvious. I like that it seems to be written by people who have actually been to each place and that the pictures are pretty but not over the top. Kind of like pictures an experienced amateur would take on a trip themselves.
This makes a good present to someone with aspirations of unique travel, someone who thinks they have already seen everything, or someone who appreciates wonders of the world.

If you are building your "lifelist" this is the book for you. It is much better at giving the reader a sense of the destination than the "1,000 places to see..." book.

This book is full of Typos! Someone should have gone through and checked the information in this book, even spots on the map are incorrect.