ATLAS OF VANISHING PLACES, great travel-guide gift that was the Illustrated Book of the Year - Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards

ATLAS OF VANISHING PLACES: The Lost Worlds as They Were and as They are Today (Unexpected Atlases series)
TRAVIS ELBOROUGH; Cartography by Martin Brown
White Lion Publishing
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Maps offer us a chance to see not just how our world looks today, and how it once looked. But what about the places that have vanished from modern atlases? With beautiful maps and stunning photography, Travis Elborough takes you on a voyage to all corners of the world in search of the lost, disappearing and vanished.

2020 WINNER OF THE EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

Discover unusual and secret places that have disappeared from modern atlases, and revel in imagining what the world once looked like. Award-winning author Travis Elborough takes you on a fascinating voyage to all corners of the world in search of the lost, disappearing and vanished.

Unearth ancient seats of power and long-forgotten civilizations through the Mayan city of Palenque; delve into the mystery of a disappeared Japanese islet; and uncover incredible hidden sites like the submerged Old Adaminaby, once abandoned but slowly remerging.

With beautiful maps and stunning colour photography, Atlas of Vanishing Places shows these sites as they once were, together with how they look today—it’s a travel guide, a modern atlas and a passage through geography like no other: travel writing has rarely been so inspiring.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I love the idea of travel more than the reality of it. My disabilities aren't forgiving of the physical exertion of my body that travel requires. A book like this one is a grace note in a more restricted life than most are required to lead. I'm glad that I could go on these historic-site voyages with the eloquent guidance of Author Elborough.

The Table of Contents is the clear road map of where we'll be going. It's always worth a close look, to gauge your giftee's interest in the book's direction.

Vanished Port-Royal, Jamaica:

A modern city submerged by an earthquake? Cool beans, four hundred years later. The tragedy no longer stings but the place is a fascinating reminder of what can happen to human places when the planet shrugs its shoulders.

The ruins of Mohenjo-Daro in modern-day Pakistan, on the dried-up course of the ancient Indus River:

The Indus Valley civilization is deeply fascinating if very underknown in the US, and the global north generally. Comparatively little attention gets paid to it, partly because it had the misfortune to be uncovered at the same time King Tut's tomb was dominating world archaeological news. Lacking gold "treasures" and charismatic stone statuary, it simply failed to gain traction. It's never recovered in the world's attention. It is so much older than other urban centers, and well-preserved because the Indus River dried up millennia ago, so no one ever came along to reuse the land on which it stands.

Examples of Author Elborough's agenda...places vanished from our collective memory and yet still present, more or less, to be visitable. Armchair travel is, for me, the best kind. The fact that these are all places with really intriguing history attached to them is a huge plus to elderly me as a reader.

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