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Introducing the Eighth Wonder of travel books. A joyous, passionate gift book for travelers-both the real and the armchair variety-1,000 PLACES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE delivers exactly the promise of its an around-the-world, continent-by-continent listing of places guaranteed to give you shivers, the unique and wonderful places you must see on and off the beaten track.
Take a safari into Botswana’s Okavango Delta, the world’s largest oasis, where if you see 10 percent of what sees you, it’s an exceptional day. Sail the Grenadines, 32 islands and hundreds of dotlike cays strung like a necklace of gems across 40 miles of pristine waters. Tour the covered souks of Aleppo, where the labyrinthine streets seem straight out of A Thousand and One Nights and frankincense and myrhh are still sold. Hike the Tasman Glacier. Climb the Tuscan hills to San Gimignano. Stay at the Hassler in Rome, or Paris’s Crillon-you must, at least once. There’s Canyon de Chelly, Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market, the backwaters of Kerala, Ipanema beach, the Buddhas of Borobudur, Mesa Verde’s cave dwellings, the Oaxaca Saturday market, Ballybunion Golf Club.
The prose is gorgeous, seizing on exactly what makes each entry worthy of inclusion. And, following the romance, the nuts and bolts: addresses, phone and fax numbers, web sites, costs, best times to visit. Of special interest are subject-specific indexes-gorgeous beaches, destination restaurants, world-class museums-making the guide entirely user-friendly, no matter if you’re dreaming or going. more info
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Total, total waste of time — it’s about hotels
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
I love the title — bought it and looked forward to reading it. What a huge disappointment. It seemed mainly to tell you what hotels/inns you shouldn’t miss. I thought it was supposed to be about things to see. Don’t waste your money.
informative
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Good job in investigating the 1,000 places. I wish the print was bigger.
Very comprehensive.
Not as good as it should/could be
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
This book is so focused on single, discrete places that it avoids and neglects what surrounds those things. No one could possibly have time or money to visit places this way. I would love a book that told me more broadly about areas that are sure to delight. In other ways, don’t just tell me about the Great Wall, tell me about restaurants in Beijing, or silk in Xian, or whatever. You don’t get on a plane and go to the Great Wall; you go to China!
A Marvelous Resource
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
What a wonderful way to discover travel possibilities! Patricia Schultz has gifted us with the opportunity to find unique experiences throughout the world. She does seem to cite an awful lot of high priced hotels as travel destination in themselves, and very few (not surprisingly) are in the third world, but if you don’t like some of her selections, just skip them. With 1000 entries that still leaves enough natural wonders and “real” experiences to keep most people busy for a lifetime of travel.
For the most part I greatly enjoyed her selections, as well as her lively writing style. Of course, I may be biased because she included my town in her list of “must sees.” Some call Roswell the world’s number one crackpot travel destination, but Ms Schultz has rightly recognized The UFO Capital of the World, in all its tacky splendor, as one of the 1000 places to see before you die!
-Lynn Michelsohn, author of Roswell, Your Travel Guide to the UFO Capital of the World!
1000 places that PAID to be listed?!?!?!
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
Expensive hotels and spas…and more hotels! Did high end hotels pay to be included in this book? I certainly find it hard to believe that with all the amazing things to see in the world, the author thinks the lobbys of non-historic hotels and other expensive (but otherwise boring) retail businesses should be on anyone’s Top 1000 list. I guess the author would suggest I skip the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids in Egypt (or in the Americas) and, instead, sit in some expensive hotel room in the middle of nowhere? Can you imagine the thrilling vacation pictures I could take of the mint on the pillow or the new tile in a hotel hallway? Ooo..sooo exciting!
I think this book was designed to make money, not be useful. Perhaps it could come in handy for wealthy travelers whose idea of seeing a foreign country is to stay at a fancy Americanized hotel and only venture outside long enough to take a limo ride to the local Starbucks and/or McDonalds outlets.
I’ll be returning this book.
Interesting Read
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Great book if you’re interested in travel/landmarks or want to plan an international vacation and not sure where you want to go. The book has a lot of information about unique places all over the world, but I wouldn’t recommend this for someone who is looking for details such as hotels, restaurants, etc. for a trip that he/she has already planned. If you do a lot of international travel, it might be fun to use this book as a personal adventure checklist!
Not what I was hoping for
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
I was really excited to get this book a few years ago. I love travelling and I hoped this book would help me find some places that were must sees. As I read through it though, I discovered that a large majority of the places listed were hotels. It was a huge disappointment. The hotels aren’t even ones that most people could afford to stay in (much less a military family with 4 children). I’ve had the pleasure of visiting many of the locations listed in this book and I must say that looking at the exterior of a hotel in whatever town I was in was the last thing on my must-do list.
Good or Bad, or just both
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
This book is a little bit of good and a little bit bad. I read future reviews about it and they all said that it had to many hotels. I thought maybe they were exaggerating so I got it. After reading the first couple of pages you knew they were telling the truth. The book was great and it was full of some sites. At least one half of the places it mentioned were about hotels. And seeing as I want to see sites and not hotels I was a little pissed off. It was set up really good though.
eh, more like, 4897 Hotels to Stay In Before You Die
Rating:2 out of 5 stars
Yes, I get it, you’ve stayed in all the five-star, treats-you-like-a-Royalty, $400-per-night Grand Hotel suites all throughout the World, and you liked their banquet dinners with their fancy hors d’oveurs while enoying the view of their pretty, “sprawling gardens”. You also should have mentioned your 24k-golden toilets and those diamond-embedded pillows you rested your head upon after a tiresome day of the luxurious tours.
Come on, I was looking for a general Tour Guide, not an All-Around-The-World Hotel Yellowpage! The compact size of the book was favorable, but I didn’t know that would mean it also had compact, 20-second guides per city. When it actually started to get interesting, it went onto other popular, well-known cities, and then finally onto her excellent selection of hotels and cabins and the like. The author should also have put into consideration the fact that most people who ARE considering a grand, World-scaled Tour, or even a brief vacation somewhere exotic, either can NOT afford such excessive luxuries on a daily basis, or they will not be WILLING to; I’m sure many people consider abroad tours just for the heck of it, i.e. backpacking–like myself. Hotels are nice, banquets are nice and the pretty sights are all nice, but I wanted more information on cost-efficient lodgings and fun, adventurous, & foreign Farmer’s Market brunches, and most importantly, more tour sites. What meager sites that were mentioned, were told of by other numerous tour books thousand times over and more.
Other than these grievances, it was a moderate tour book with portable size and portable, brief info.
At least you could have printed the pictures COLORED!!
Interestingly popular…
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
I was looking forward to reading this book because 1)I love travel, 2)it’s been on every top 10 travel book list for a couple years now, and 3)I own a travel agency and thought I might get some new, creative ideas for my clients that want to go/do something out of the box.
First, 1000 things to do/see is a lot, however, when talking about the global travel picture, how can you narrow things down to 1000? This was a very difficult undertaking.
Although I don’t agree with many of the author’s inclusions in the book, I like the format, the layout, and I feel the information included on each location is sufficient to determine if I should research further as a destination I would like to visit. I think the way she tackled large cities is excellent.
The book is heavy on hotels – I’m not sure why. As an adventure/outdoor person, I would have liked to see more destinations with active outlets.
Overall, I would recommend this book. Perhaps not for reading cover to cover, but for getting ideas, conducting research, and another interesting travel perspective. Patricia Schultz is certainly well traveled.
If you want to discuss further, the Travel Book Club in Grand Rapids, MI at Barnes & Noble will be discussing this book on Tuesday, 2/24/09 from 6-7 pm.
Jodie — Cruise Holidays of Grand Rapids, http://www.cruiseholidays.com/sail , jodie@cruiseholidays.com
Insulting
Rating:2 out of 5 stars
342 pages on Europe.
45 pages on Africa.
As many have pointed out, the list is so skewed and biased as to be insulting. The writing is often not useful, or focuses on misleading aspects of an area. Why talk about the hotels and not the sites?
The other review I find useful is that this focuses often on things to see, not things to do. Besides, as another reviewer pointed out, it simply isn’t adventerous: often discussing going to locales to see a place, instead of the expereinces of traveling and actually engaging in areas.
And just to reiterate:
342 pages on Europe.
45 pages on Africa.
Nice book to own
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This is the perfect book to flip through on a rainy day when you are thinking of far off places you would love to visit. While personal preference plays a large part in the places one should visit, this book provides a great starting point for each country. The information is both up-to-date and detailed. Learn about exotic places you would never had added to your list or read about places in your own backyard. Highly recommended.
a book about hotels
Rating:2 out of 5 stars
I have to reinforce what others have said. This books tends to stress 5 star hotels and fancy restaurants. One of the entries for Dublin is to go to a fancy french restaurant. I can see having a pint in a Dublin pub as a thing to do, and she has recommendations for that. But for fancy french food, I think I would go to France.
Starting point
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This is a very fun book for a lot of reasons. It can be read to kick off your travel imagination to places you might visit and those you never will. The criticisms of the book are very well-taken but I think would-be readers in search of an adventure should read by the ridiculously priced hotels and imagine their own trip to the fabulous places they read about. For example, when I visited Cuzco we stayed in a $7 a night hotel, in Arequipa. We had a great roof top room for $5 a night right over the central square. The places the book suggests to say, are in my mind, ridiculous if you really want to experience the cities you are visiting. That said, the monastary in Arequipa, Peru, for example, is incredible. I will never forget the wonderful interior courtyards painted with incrdible color combinations like aqua and mango. For us, the monastery was a chance find of incredible good luck. This books tells you about that. Take the tip and forget the hotel.
Similarly, the $1995 Inca trail trip is probably a loser for adventurers who don’t want crowds. You can do a wonderful one-day portion of the trail in isolation for free, by getting off the train from Cuzco to Aqua Caliente at milepost 81 and hike in the rest of the way by yoruself. The experience of crossing the pass and looking down at Machu Pichu, as though you were the first to find it, is the memory of a lifetime. This book wont’t tell you about that, but you can figure it out on your own with further research. The book, however, could tip a person who has never heard of the Inca Trail to the possiblity of hiking it.
I think it is a mistake to ignore the great trips suggested because the very unadventurous writers insist on insular, super-expensive hotels. Use the book as a starting point to fire up your imagination and then plan your own trip. I think it has great ideas for places to go for the adventurous. It is probably least useful for those who are neither adventurous or rich, although even those people can use it to travel with their imagination.
A cornucopia of amazing places
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This a fun book. You could make up your own trivial pursuit games from its 894 pages. Where is…? What is…? and so forth. You can pick this book up anytime you have a few minutes to spare, and put it down without worrying about how the plot turns out.
It is a big world out there with many places that this retired history and government teacher is embarrassed to admit that he’s never heard about before–let alone been able to notch the passport when ticking one more off the list.
I don’t find that a one line citation for a restaurant or hotel is too much–often just one or two per place. That information gives another dimension to the historic and cultural description. It’s also OK for me that the author tends to note the high end. Across the world Five Star is more standard than One Star, and besides I wouldn’t use this one book to decide where to stay or eat.
Anyway, even if I don’t go there, at least I’ve now heard about it.
My Traveling Bible
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
You can’t please everyone with an ambitious book of this nature – it is one person’s personal Life List. She is not writing it to please her readers but rather to share her favorite places around the world. You’d be hard pressed not to find a few hundred remarkable places to keep you busy for the next many years!
(This is the third copy I have purchased because it makes a great gift for the travelers in my life)
An OK Book
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I have given this book a rating of “4″ because it does contain a fairly good list of places one might want to see. Some of the details written in the book are not that much in depth so don’t expect a complete detailed writing’s on the places to see. Not a lot of pictures so your imagination will have to take over.Frankly I would not pay retail for any travel books like this one thus I always look for heavy discounts like Amazon AND low cost shipping.Now back to the book. This is a thick one with a thousand place listing thus I think one gets their monies worth. We have been a great number of the places listed and find the writing to be for the most part accurate. It’s hard to have scenic vies and places become obsolete however man made locations may be not be the most up to date especially as time goes by. We recommend the book for a quick reference.
Been there…
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
All in all, a pretty fun, useful book. While it shouldn’t be used as the ultimate resource for any adventure, it still offers some great suggestions and tips. In checking out some places I’ve lived around the world, I was mildly surprised both at the author listing places I wouldn’t suggest, and omitting sites I’d rate as don’t-miss… but any travel guide would have such shortcomings — especially one with as broad a subject as the entire world.
On the bright side, it’s put some locations on my itinerary that otherwise would have been left off — for that, I thank the author. Each site’s cost estimates and best time of the year are great helps, too.
And finally, a friend that has lived all over the world with the State Department was given this book as a Christmas gift, along with a rubber stamp to mark the pages with “Been there… Done that.” I thought that was brilliant.
A Very Successful Gift
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Last night our family opened Christmas gifts and I got my brother and sister-in-law several things that they could share. One was “1,000 Places to See Before You Die”. They’ve been talking about going on a trip to Tuscany next year and the author lived in Florence, Italy, for 3 years. The whole family loved the book.
Lots of Fun!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
The spirit of this book is well exemplified by a quotation from Mark Twain (Page xv): “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the tide winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” So, the author advances a listing of places throughout the world worth discovering. This is a companion piece to another volume of hers, in which she explores 1,000 places to see within the United States.
The world is divided into eight regions, for the purposes of organizing discussion: Europe; Africa; the Middle East; Asia; Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands; the United States and Canada; Latin America; the Caribbean, Bahamas, and Bermuda.
In a brief review here, it would be impossible to illustrate each region in any depth. Maybe some samples from a few of the regions. Needless to say, any selection like this is apt to engender discussion–Why were some places left out? Why were others included? But that’s part of the fun of a book like this!
Europe: Some of the usual suspects like Windsor Castle, Winchester Cathedral, London, the Salzburg Festival, Vienna, Paris, Versailles, the Brandenburg Gate, and the Sistine Chapel. But there are other treasures as well: Bellagio, Rhodes, Ile de Re, Kinsale, and Ludlow.
Africa: The Great Pyramids, Abu Simbel, Jack’s Camp in the Kalahari Desert, the Cape Winelands, and so on.
United States and Canada: Kenai Peninsula, Monterey Peninsula, Telluride, South Beach, Art Institute of Chicago (one of my favorite art museums), Art Gallery of Ontario, Nimmo Bay Resort, Polar Bear Safari, and the like.
This is fun simply to browse. Choose a page at random and fantasize a trip there. . . . Again, lots of fun!