Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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83 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very well done, December 11, 2001
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.
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49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must have travel book, October 2, 2000
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.
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51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Meant to be on a coffee table, but bogged down by guide info, September 8, 2001
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.
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by Steve Watkins
by Steve Watkins
