My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Quarto Publishing Group- White Lion for an advanced copy of this atlas of forgotten and disappearing sites around the world.

As we advance into the future so many things around us are disappearing. Technology goes obsolete and is discarded. Animals and plants are made extinct. Our sense of history, morals and shame are eroding away as politics and people go lower and dumber. Places too disappear, the west is loaded with ghost towns as mining fads came and went, or industrial towns that died because their industry was cheaper to make elsewhere. Travis Elborough in his latest book in the series Atlas of Vanishing Places: The Lost Worlds as They Were and as They Are Today, takes readers on a tour of the world where once great cities and locations, written of in song, poem, and heroic ballads, have been lost, forgotten, reclaimed by the earth, or sacrificed for both human expansion and human greed.

The book begins with a brief section on why things vanish, Man-made disasters, nature, war, failing and fallen empires or even just ennui. The book is broken into sections, Ancient Cities, Forgotten Lands, Shrinking Places and Threatened Worlds. A timeline in a way of wow things can go from important to dismissed by history. Places mentioned include Xanadu in Mongolia/ China, Roanoke in North Carolina, The Dead Sea in Jordan and the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. All are given brief descriptions, a history, importance, loss, discovery, or why the place is threatened and how its vanishing could be halted, complete with pictures and art.

The book is fascinating, as all the books in the series have been. A guide to places that aren't commonly known, or known from legends or settings in books, or sadly in the modern places, a location that is not given a though about where it might be going to. The text is short, but informative, giving enough of an overview to give a sense of what happened, with a bibliography listing more books for further investigation. The writing is a mix of both fact and melancholy, maybe not best read straight through, but to be dipped in for a few cities, as the long tale of history does get kind of familiar. A travel guide of extinction in a way.

A perfect book for history nerds, travellers and fiction writers who want to get an idea of the past and lost cities for their characters to explore. This is the third in the series, and I have read all of them, enjoying them all in special ways and yet finding myself strangely sad at the end of all of them. Soon there will be books written about our cities underwater from climate change, or lost in curable pandemics and religious/ political reasons we don't want to see coming. This book gives a good idea of what our future is going to look like.

The thing with reading Atlas of Vanishing Places: The Lost Worlds as They Were and as They Are Today by Travis Elborough is to go in with managed expectations. The collection of brief descriptions of places lost or lost then found or about to be lost is best thought of as an introductory sampler rather than a substantive look at each place, something that gives you just the minimum of information for you to decide if you want to do a bit more research. Read in that vein, it’s a solid collection, a bit eclectic/arbitrary in its choices but broad-based.

The book is divided into the following several sections (I’ve also given a few representative sites):
• Ancient Cities (Hattusa, Turkey; Xanadu, Mongolia; Ciudad Perdida, Colombia; Petra Jordon)
• Forgotten Lands (Chan Chan, Peru; Roanoke, USA; Lion City, China)
• Shrinking Places (the Danube, the Dead Sea, the Everglades)
• Threatened Worlds (Timbuktu, Mali; Skara Brae, Orkney; Congo Basin Rainforest)

Even from the brief list above you can see the wide range of geography and culture covered in the book one of the plusses. Each site gets 1-3 pages of text, though that’s a very rough estimate thanks to formatting issues on my Kindle App (sigh). As noted and as you can tell from the length, these are very brief, very introductory descriptions that don’t go too in-depth. They do vary in detail and quality, with some feeling more substantive in terms of history and physical detail and sense of research and others feeling like a snippet from Wikipedia. Each segment, regardless of its detail, comes with a number of illustrations, mostly photographs of the site, some historical some relatively recent. The sites themselves as mentioned are eclectic; sadly Elborough could have chosen any of a number of sites for such a book. But the list is a decent mix of the already-familiar (Petra, Everglades, Roanoke, Danube, Alexandria, Dead Sea, etc.) and the probably far less well known (Mahabalipuram, Skipsea, Esanbehanakitakojima).

From my viewpoint, because of the nature of the book (more a teaser than a full accounting), I’d call it the perfect library book as opposed to a book for purchase, especially as while there are a number of photographs, they’re not “coffee-table-display-for-guests” quality or size. A good book therefore to check out, get a sense of what sites you’re more interested in, return to the library, and then do more research.

Get Lost

This is another high quality entry in Elborough's series of books about lost and disappearing places, (for example, "Atlas of Improbable Places" and "Atlas of the Unexpected"). For each site we are rewarded with a fairly deep and generally informative text description, high quality and well composed modern and historical photos of the location, and, (as an especially important and rewarding feature), a detailed map/drawing of the site as it likely originally appeared. The reader can experience the now and imagine the then. With more than 35 sites, (categorized as "Ancient Cities", "Forgotten Lands", "Shrinking Places", and "Threatened Worlds"), to choose from there's plenty to entice even the most experienced armchair explorer.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)