Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders (2016)

Atlas Obscura is a distillation of the entries on the atlasobscura.com website; it's two creators tried to pick the best entries for most of the world and bound them in a beautiful book full of color photographs and illustrations.

I was unaware of the website when I got this book, and I think that probably made it even better: almost all of the entries were new to me and almost all of them were fascinating, or macabre, or so weird they were worth reading about (a breakout section included examples of doctors on Antartica forced to operate on themselves; a man in Vermont that makes art out of spider webs; the breakout map of Lake Monsters of the USA).

Each of the entries are only a few paragraphs or less, making it easy to pick up and put down at your leisure. If you like traveling, or armchair traveling, and you enjoy reading about the weird and the wonderful, definitely check this book out. ( )

Amazing book to read in dribs and drabs--perfect coffee table book with which to start conversations on weird and obscure things! ( )

My review of this book can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/iXpmDvmuldI

Enjoy! ( )

I ordered this book for my library collection not really knowing what it was all about. When it came in from processing for the shelves, I happened to pick it up and browse through it. What a find! www.atlasobscura.com is a website created in 2009 by Joshua Foer (a science writer and author of the international bestseller Moonwalking with Einstein) and Dylan Thuras. It is a collaborative effort where people from all over the world can add information about interesting and obscure places, people, histories, art and architecture, just to name a few. The website gave birth to the book, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders, published in late 2016 by Workman Publishing Company. It was my Non-Fiction pic for #libfaves16 this year, and when I tweeted “It’s like porn for information junkies,” the publisher retweeted it with the comment “what else can be said?!”

The book is oversized (hence the larger purchase price), and is divided into areas of the world, such as Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada, USA and Latin American. Within these sections are photos, drawings, maps, and, of course, written information about, well, obscure people, places and things that most of us have never heard about! I, of course, started my review of this unique book in the USA section, “Four Corners and the Southwest,” which includes my native state, Texas. In one entry, titled “Ozymandias on the Plains,” there is a picture of a sculpture of “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in Amarillo with references to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” The sculpture is out in the middle of a field with cows grazing in the meadow surrounding it. Created by sculptor Lightnin’ McDuff, it is continually vandalized to include socks on the feet, perhaps to keep the legs warm…..

The other entry that captured my attention are the Pando Aspens located in Richfield, Utah. Though it may look like a forest of trees, it is actually a single organism – every stem is genetically identical and is linked by a single root system, making it the heaviest, and one of the oldest, organisms in the world. The root system is an estimated 80,000 years old!

These are only two of hundreds of entries from all over the world contained in the delightful book, Atlas Obscura. I loved it so much, I gave it to several people for Christmas. I highly recommend this title for anyone with curiosity and a sense of wonder about the world.

There is also a children's version of this book published in 2018 that would be a great addition to any juvenile non-fiction collection.


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The world is full of wonderful and magnificent things, from spectacular beaches, to amazing vistas, beautiful creatures and breath-taking waterfalls. But look a little harder and you can find a whole lot of other remarkable, wonderful and weird thing to amuse and entertain. If you are looking for those sorts of things, then this is the book for you.

Split into regions, the authors have brought together the most strange collection of naturally created objects, places and human artefacts. And there is everything that you could imagine in here; diamond encrusted skeletons, museums of strange things, buildings, boats, caves full of glow-worms, scrap sculptures and even car henge. It is filled full of photos of these weird and strange places, with a little background on each and a description on how to get there. It is well researched, and regardless of what page you open, you will find that there is always something to fascinate and marvel at.

Oh, and the website is fascinating too www.atlasobscura.com ( )