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This book is great. It gives details for over 200 countries and the pictures are nice.
This is a Good book.But after time past, it need to be updated and improved. and also need to add more info, so many people will be happy
the book came to me in the condition i expected and more. i had gotten a little message from the seller that said, "thanks for your purchase, and i hope you enjoy this book as much as i did." i was very touched and i love the book so much.
A much better book for travelers is National Geographic's Journeys of a Lifetime 500 of the World's Greatest Trips. Oh sure, you can go back to map of the world at the front of the book and read thru all the tiny names to find the country you are looking at, but you'll probably fracture your arm in the process.
It weighs a freakin' ton and needs to be put on a table (instead of your lap) to look at. Totally impractical.
I borrowed this book from the local library and found it to be one of the most unwieldly books in existence. What irritates me most is each country's skeletal map which doesn't show it's relationship to the rest of the world.
Additionally, the photos for the most part aren't all that great. Information is minimal.
Individual maps could at least have shown the country within it's continent or region. It may not include every country in the world, but it's much more informative, original and the photos are gorgeous.
The picture could have just as easily been from the Bronx, Minneapolis, or Uganda. Don't look for any depth here whatsoever, likewise don't look for unbiased information uncolored by editorial viewpoint, but do look for a motivator for travel. While the photographs are generally excellent and well composed, there is a lack of substance to many of them, an issue that is difficult to overlook given the premise of the book being essentially a visual feast of a variety of countries. (For the record the photo from Uganda is a boy smiling). Sounds pretty good until you realize that many companies have extreme security measures in place in Dakar including heavily armed guards and restrictions on personal travel in town due to some very real world hazards.
Unfortunately the same amount of space is devoted to a country like Tuvalu (population 11,305) as on countries as multi-faceted as France, Spain, Japan, or the United States. The text says "Dakar, its capital city, is raw, crowded, and exciting, and more favoured by travellers than many of the other larger African cities." [The spelling is due to the book having been published in Australia]. (Sure makes me want to visit, how about you). I love to travel and I think this book fosters interest to traveling to unique places that otherwise might get overlooked. What is more accurate is that it presents a few bullet points on every country in the world.
"The Travel Book" is a Lonely Planet book with much promise and many features to recommend it: it also falls short in a number of areas. It's a nice coffee table book and one to get people thinking of traveling to off the beaten path destinations, which I think is a great thing. The same holds true in Colombia, which is described as "the land of.'One Hundred Years of Solitude' - a tale as magical as the country itself. Here the authors offer high praise for Senegal and its capital, Dakar. The single best thing included is advice on when to visit: the authors consider mainly weather, but also other important factors. This isn't the UN where every country gets an equal vote; it's a book which is not as informative as it should and could have been if it was focused on presenting relevant information, not simply a few pre-ordained bullet points about superficialities.Finally there is the matter of bias.
Clearly the amount of information relevant to deciding on a trip is orders of magnitude larger for Germany than the Pitcairn Islands (population 47), which the book says lost one third of its male population to imprisonment on morals charges in 2004. Along those same lines, some of the information provided is excellent, while some is essentially pointless. The book is enormous, heavy, and printed on heavy stock. Louis, Oakland, etc. There are numerous examples of bias in this (and other) Lonely Planet books (see also, for example, the description of the US in the "Bluelist"). Far from being a place to avoid, complex and hospitable Colombia offers some of South America's most varied landscapes, flora and fauna." It also offers drug cartels and not infrequent kidnappings. That alone was an extremely redeeming quality of the book. (China, anyone).
to be sure, but you read descriptions of how wonderful and serene, say, Côte d'Ivoire or Senegal is, and then read the US entry endorsing "The Godfather" trilogy as the best cinematic representation of the country, while describing the cities in the US as "dangerous," all the while selecting as the quote for Nicaragua a passage that could not make the editorial bias any more clear: "I'd spent my days being lectured by former Sandinista rebels and meeting three-year-old orphans, my nights getting loaded on Flor de Caña rum and dancing with gorgeous Nicaraguan men. True to it's promise, the book does devote two pages on every conventionally recognized country on the planet, but the claim on the cover that it's "a journey through every country in the world" is a bit of overstatement. I am not defending crime-ridden US cities like St. The editorial tone is quite liberal and rhetorically anti-US. My employer sends people to Senegal (but for one example) all the time. It was and overly romantic 23-year-old leftist's dream come true." I don't have a problem with editorial stance, but if you are going to take a position don't pretend to be an unbiased sourcebook: clearly I am wary of the descriptions of other countries given this obvious and overt bias. In that role it is successful. The photography is generally excellent, but many of the images are cliché in the extreme, particularly those from Africa and the Caribbean, where almost every country has a portrait of a young child smiling: the one for Saint Lucia is so formulaic that the picture of the girl is actually captioned "A portrait of a smiling girl." Hey Lonely Planet, what does that have to do with Saint Lucia.
It's place is certainly not as a guidebook, but rather as a thought-provoking photo album of interesting places in the world. The point is the book points out meaningless trivia about smaller countries (there's less material to work with after all), while glossing over extremely important features of larger countries with long and interesting histories. The descriptions of these countries seem pretty reasonable until you encounter countries you know well. Note that I am not against Colombians or Senegalese people, or even necessarily travel to their countries (I have especially found Colombians to be friendly and enjoyable to get to know), but I do think readers deserve a realistic assessment of the hazards of travel to countries with areas far more dangerous than the cities of the US.This book was a disappointment to me in many ways, but I still think it has merit when used correctly. On balance I still think that's a good thing.
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