As an editor at Frommer's travel guides, I have one big regret: that Hurricane Katrina beat me to New Orleans. It's sad and even a little embarrassing that I canceled plans to go not once but twice before it was too late. I'll always have the zydeco and jazz records that made me want to visit so badly, but the city as it was will remain a void in my experience. It's irreplaceable.
500 Places to See Before They Disappear is, like the jacket says, a "celebration of the world's most fragile wonders." It's also an inspiring memorial to treasures like New Orleans, sunken so suddenly and unpredictably that a book probably couldn't have saved it. But imagine knowing that outsiders and ordinary citizens could have done more to keep the levees from breaking: Would we have stayed home? Or would more of us have visited sooner rather than later, fallen in love, and rallied to do all we could to preserve a city unlike any other in the world? In its memory, will we let other singular places go? This book will leave you asking these questions not just about New Orleans--championed in the "Cityscapes in Peril" section--but also about Venice, the old Jewish ghetto in Budapest, the hutong neighborhoods of Beijing, the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the wild white horses of the Camargue, and hundreds of other rare towns, landscapes, monuments, and habitats with uncertain futures in the face of environmental and human threats.
We read of imperiled species, wilderness areas, and cultural relics every day in the news, we see them on the Travel Channel, or we live near them and lobby for their protection. This book gathers a worldwide range of the neediest or most extraordinary sites under one cover. The reviews are richly evocative but pithy; you can savor them piecemeal, allowing them to sink into your daily awareness, making the news stories about each one a little more resonant--not as good as being there, but good enough to inspire a trip and maybe even a commitment to help keep a special place out of harm's way. --Maureen Clarke, senior editor, Frommer's
Reviewed By : Maureen Clarke : Nov 14, 2008
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