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The world is a breathtakingly big place, and in this big book we have undertaken the big task of detailing as much of it as we can – every single country, many of the larger dependencies and other, smaller destinations. With the traveler’s experience at its heart, this book shows a slice of life in every corner of the globe, and all points in between, engaging the reader’s senses in an adventure which conjures up the sights, smells, tastes, sounds and feel of our amazing world. more info
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“The Travel Book”
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Perfect. Nice to know at least a little about each country you have heard of,knowing you will never get there to see it in person. Pat
Open the door and take a step outside. Try it, you might like it
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
I just received my book and as many reviews state, yes it has wonderful pictures.
Update, I just returned from reaching my 22nd country and after having explored Central America, I changed my mind about this book. While the book lacks in detail, it is rich on ideas and places to visit. It’s also a great way to say to your friends, I was here and here and then I went there too. Maybe it will encourage them to put on their walking shoes and go out to explore our world.
Travel Book
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This book gives a clear view of different countiries of the world. It gives suggestion of places to see and the best times to see them. Not only is it informative but a wonderful coffee table book aswell
Too Little About Too Much
Rating:2 out of 5 stars
I borrowed this book from the local library and found it to be one of the most unwieldly books in existence! It weighs a freakin’ ton and needs to be put on a table (instead of your lap) to look at. Totally impractical. Additionally, the photos for the most part aren’t all that great. Information is minimal. What irritates me most is each country’s skeletal map which doesn’t show it’s relationship to the rest of the world. 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. Individual maps could at least have shown the country within it’s continent or region. A much better book for travelers is National Geographic’s Journeys of a Lifetime 500 of the World’s Greatest Trips. It may not include every country in the world, but it’s much more informative, original and the photos are gorgeous!
Great coffee table book
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
My family and I are avid travelers. I bought this book for my dad for Christmas.I just had to have a copy, too. It’s nice to have a resource for planning new adventures!
Big disappointment
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
I bought this book and find it absolutely useless. If you expect to learn something about a country this is not the book for you. It is a big waste of money. A huge heavy book that will gather dust on your coffee table. Very little information about the countries. I found it absolutely uselss and rather typical of the out-of-date information that Lonely Planet turns out today. If you are a traveler and want to learn something about the countries of the world, find another book. Very sorry that I bought it.
One of the best books I own!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I keep this book on my coffee table and find myself getting lost in it at least once a week. Not only was it a huge endeavor for them to make a compilation of every country in the world but the information they include on each page gives you a perfect taste of each country. They include music and books to listen to a read before you head over, sayings, cultural facts and pictures. I have thoroughly enjoyed owning this book and I have received nothing but compliments on it each time a friend stops by. If you are a travel buff or just love learning about new cultures and places this is the book for you.
Great book! Lots of great pictures and helpful information
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This is a great book with lots of helpful, yet basic, information about each place. It is a lot of fun to open up to a random page and read about a country that you may have never heard of. It is a wonderful gift for people who love to travel. The pictures are beautiful. My only qualm is that I wish more of the pictures were of the actual place (i.e. monuments, landscapes, etc.), rather than people from the place.
Substantial Yet Inadequate
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
“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. 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. What is more accurate is that it presents a few bullet points on every country in the world.
The book is enormous, heavy, and printed on heavy stock. 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 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? The picture could have just as easily been from the Bronx, Minneapolis, or Uganda. (For the record the photo from Uganda is a boy smiling.) 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.
Along those same lines, some of the information provided is excellent, while some is essentially pointless. The single best thing included is advice on when to visit: the authors consider mainly weather, but also other important factors. That alone was an extremely redeeming quality of the book. 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. 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. (Sure makes me want to visit, how about you?) 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. (China, anyone?) 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. The descriptions of these countries seem pretty reasonable until you encounter countries you know well. My employer sends people to Senegal (but for one example) all the time. Here the authors offer high praise for Senegal and its capital, Dakar. 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.] 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. 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. 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. 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”). The editorial tone is quite liberal and rhetorically anti-US. I am not defending crime-ridden US cities like St. Louis, Oakland, etc. 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. 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. 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. It’s place is certainly not as a guidebook, but rather as a thought-provoking photo album of interesting places in the world. I love to travel and I think this book fosters interest to traveling to unique places that otherwise might get overlooked. In that role it is successful. 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. On balance I still think that’s a good thing.
It inspires me.
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I was surprised so many people critiqued this book as if it could even begin to be a comprehensible travel book for the ENTIRE WORLD. When I bought it (in a bookstore, so I knew the format beforehand), I never intended for it to guide me to certain things in certain countries. I reviewed many of the pages of countries I had already been to, and according to Lonely Planet, I’d missed some stuff, but whatever. That happens with any book — I wouldn’t give up my nights relaxing at the Okey Dokey off of the Vltava subway stop in Prague just because Lonely Planet said I needed to walk across the Charles Bridge at the break of dawn. (I did that at 2 a.m., and it was just as peaceful.) Rather, I looked on it as a representation of my greatest pipe dream … to experience, not just see, every country in the world. My husband and I live on a tight budget; he was surprised I’d spent $30 on a book. But when he started to flip through it, he was likewise enchanted. (I knew there was a reason I married him.) It’s just so inspiring … it reminds you that there is so much out there to see and explore. During the 2008 Olympics, I kept the book by my side, and every time some teensy-weensy country would stroll out with an athlete, I’d look it up in the book, thinking, surely this isn’t in there. They all were.
My husband is in the process of applying for jobs abroad, finally having heeded my pleading (I teach school and ESL). When he told me that he was not applying for positions in Singapore, I pulled the book out again and had him look at the size of Singapore and its closeness to other amazing countries. Now he’s applying there, too.
Look, if you need a travel guide, this isn’t it. But it you love this planet and the myriad of people who inhabit it, well, this is a good place to start.
Great travel book
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This book is excellent for anyone who has a good sense of wanderlust. It gives a good snippit for each country and the pictures are beautiful. You will be planning trips in no time!
25,000 miles wide and an inch deep
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Who knew Lonely Planet, publisher of the quintessential guides for backpack-hostel-rail pass travelers, aspired to become the next National Geographic?
The Travel Book is a radical departure from Lonely Planet’s usual practice of producing in-depth, densely written guidebooks for young travelers. The purpose of this book, rather, is to act as a visual introduction to every country in the world. Yes, you read that correctly. The Travel Book covers 231 countries, including all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations (the “extra” 38 come from giving selected regions and foreign dependencies popular with travelers, such as French Polynesia, Scotland, and Antarctica, their own sections).
Each country receives its own brief section, with most of the space devoted to rich and evocative photographs of people and places. The written text in each section is very minimal and does not go much beyond brief discussions of the best time of year to visit, essential experiences, and related books, music, and films. As a result, The Travel Book isn’t very useful for learning facts about a place or for planning a trip. It’s really meant to act as a catalyst, as a way to think about travel emotionally, not rationally.
Bottom line: The Travel Book is an art book. It contains gorgeous, beautifully composed photographs of virtually every region in the world. Don’t expect to use The Travel Book for planning a vacation, though. Despite being published by Lonely Planet, it contains very little practical information (by design). Personally, I would have liked a little more writing about each country, but overall the book accomplishes what it sets out to do: “to represent every country in the world with amazing images and inspirational text.”
3.5 stars.
—-
And now, two other great travel books:
Bad Trips-a entertaining compilation about what can go WRONG when traveling
The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America-Bill Bryson at his best…incredibly funny, cynical, and biting, on a road trip across the USA
Breath-taking photographs
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
High-fives and congrats to the smart people at Lonely Planet Publications. This beautifully photographed book is a treasure that you must see for yourself. The somewhat plain cover hides the wonder you’ll find inside. Every country is included with multiple photographs and brief, but relevant (and sometimes humorous) information. This is not a detailed book to use when planning a trip. It is a starting place for travelers and armchair dreamers. There is beauty in every country in the world and the proof is within these pages. Buy multiple copies. You’ll want one to keep and several to give away as gifts to anyone interested in travel or photography.
good, but nothing special
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This book is huge, letter format and has a good quality. Every country in the world is introduced on a double page – this often leaves only the most obvious tourist sites for display, albeit with nice pictures.
If you look for some inspiration where to go to and which country to explore, this book is well suited for you. If you are looking for more details, you will be disappointed. However, you can always get yourself excited for a particular country and then read more literature about it.
You won’t regret the money spent, but you may not be amazed by the book.
Don’t purchase from this seller
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
I never got the book. Contacted seller twice and was ignored. Amazon.com customer service also ignored me. Dealing with mastercard and disputing the charge – they are helpful at least. Signed – Not a happy customer.
Great Look @ the World
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I loved this so much I bought one for a gift. It’s a wonderful look at EVERY country in the world…. amazing!
Coffee table worthy
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This book is supremely cool. The photos are amazing – simply breath-taking.
4 stars instead of 5 because in the paperback edition, the binding will crack if you actually read the book more than once.
just what i expected!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
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!
Great coffee table book!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This book is fantastic for the travel lover. Beautiful, colorful pictures highlight each of the countries. I saw countries I thought I knew well in a whole new light!
Gorgeous
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This book will may make you feel proud to be live on this beautiful planet. Hopefully you will also feel inspired to plan travel to one or more of the amazing places documented in this book.