An instructive engagement with the world of travel writing and a first-class exemplar of its practice.
An appeal for more responsible tourism replete with respectful and inquisitive travelers.
An American journalist and travel writer based in France, McClanahan, a regular contributor to the New York Times, believes that contemporary global tourism should turn away from commercialization, which is often insensitive to the harm caused to local communities and the environment. In her estimation, contemporary international tourism is destructive and self-indulgent. Reform, though, will require a proportional expansion in tourists who value diverse cultures and learn from their tourist experiences. This “new tourist” could counterbalance the many people who visit tourist enclaves solely to consume theatrical versions of local culture. The author chronicles the rise in the 1970s of travel books that appealed to less affluent and more adventurous travelers and the impact in the 2000s of social media on print-based travel writing. She examines the post-1970s commitment to tourism as an integral component of government economic development policies, the emergence of “tourist traps” that cater to fantasy versions of a place, and the inevitable backlash when tourism drives up rent, takes over beaches, damages the local environment, and undermines traditional culture. McClanahan also tells stories of local groups and local governments working to better manage tourism. She illustrates these themes with descriptions of her visits to such places as Angkor Wat, downtown Liverpool, Barcelona, the French Alps, Hawaii, Amsterdam’s red-light district, and Disneyland Paris (formerly Euro Disney). By deftly weaving together her impressions of these places and stories of the people she interviewed, McClanahan creates an engaging and thoughtful assessment of international tourism. She offers few recommendations beyond more community involvement and stronger governmental regulation, however. Rather, her goal is to provide a “framework” for readers to ask pertinent questions about other places.
An instructive engagement with the world of travel writing and a first-class exemplar of its practice.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781668011775
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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