Book 22: 100 Places You Will Never Visit

100 Places You Will Never Visit: The World's Most Secret Locations

Daniel Smith

Between this book's title, which is a nicely cheeky send-up of the burgeoning bucket list genre, and its cover, which features a sign warning trespassers about a nearby "laser hazard"(!), I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I was thus slightly disappointed to discover that the book is, in fact, a relatively serious, straightforward tour of some of the world's most dangerous and most strictly guarded places, from the obvious (the Chernobyl fallout area, Langley, Fort Knox) to the ambiguously located (crash sites and smuggling tunnels), unknown (Snake Island, Surtsey, North Sentinel Island), and officially denied (Moscow's second subway and various military installations). While Smith makes an effort to include a variety of natural and manmade locales all around the world, the book is unsurprisingly heavy on the United States, England, and the rest of Europe, with a few token entries from a variety of countries both expected (China and North Korea get a couple) and, perhaps, more surprising (Somalia). Likewise, the book concentrates on a few types of locations; while each is, of course, unique, the similarities can make for a somewhat drab experience as the reader encounters yet another military research and development complex, bank vault, or national intelligence headquarters. The book's geographically oriented organization- Smith begins roughly at the International Date Line and proceeds eastward across the globe- is a good idea, but results in quite a few unexciting clusters. In a book that already relies too heavily on repetition, this is a grave error.

All of this could, of course, be mitigated by excellent, searing prose. While Smith sneaks in a few attempts at humor, many are misplaced and even the goods ones do not adequately compensate for the otherwise unremarkable prose. The editing is also a bit lacking, with copy errors cropping up and inadequate attention paid to the little details that lend even bad books a certain sense of flow. The book suffers from unexplained abbreviations and abrupt endings; when a page ends at the end of a sentence, it is nearly impossible to guess whether the next page will continue the current segment or open a new one. The entry for Osama bin Laden's final hideout in Pakistan is adequate enough, referencing the government's intention to demolish the building. The problem? The accompanying photograph shows the compound mid-demolition. I understand that layout often happens well after a text is completed, but surely someone looked at the final product before it went to distribution? Though frustrating at this and many other moments, the book does offer a decent glimpse at many of the locations it covers, piquing the reader's interest or at least allowing them to move on to another entry quickly enough. I was pleased to learn about and revisit several of the featured locales and the book does make an adequate reference volume, best read, perhaps, as an afterthought. For all of its faults, the research behind the book appears to fit the author's ambitions and most of the prose is serviceable, if forgettable. 100 Places You Will Never Visit is a somewhat uneven, mildly entertaining coffee table book that may best be enjoyed in small doses.

Grade: B-

Book 42: Atlantic

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories
Simon Winchester

I picked this up both based on the author's reputation and on my own belief that it would be a nice, well-written history of the remarkable Atlantic Ocean from a number of different perspectives and, to some extent, that's what Simon Winchester delivers in Atlantic. To another, however, he talks about this bit without actually defining what it is about the Atlantic Ocean that makes it, well, the Atlantic and not the Pacific or Indian or either of the polar seas; his text is littered throughout with references to a kind of Atlantic-ness, but never once does he address this contention, and the book suffers, condemned to flail rather than cohere. Without the appearance of this much-needed overarching theme, the chapters, arranged in a somewhat bizarre homage to Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" speech (no, really) make little sense in relation to each other and even less within themselves. The idea of casting the waters as a being with several stages of life is less clever than cutesy, and while grouping developments such as exploration, war, and environmentalism into their own chapters makes sense, the cuts Winchester makes between them are divisive, and the individual parts are never allowed to coalesce into a single, intricate picture. He misses the ocean for the individual molecules of di-hydrogen monoxide. Even these, however, frequently become misplaced, and the book is littered with irrelevant anecdotes and irredeemably uninteresting, disruptive, and downright pointless footnotes that often have nothing at all to do with the subject at hand.

A lack of greater strategic planning is evident on a paragraph-by-paragraph level, as well, as the author seems to introduce an idea only to discard it entirely after the next indent, without so much as a line break or, heaven forbid, three dividing asterisks. All of this makes the book slightly maddening before its information is even digested, and repetition, likely borne of the deceptively haphazard organizational scheme, makes the book even more cumbersome. With all of this said, however, the book isn't all bad; it certainly contains quite a lot of interesting, if not entirely riveting, information, and Winchester does touch on several different aspects of life in, around, and on this mighty ocean. For all its faults, the book has a sense of grandiose perspective, and when the author turns his attentions to geology or the effects of modern industrialism, this sense of magnitude helps him create a persuasive argument for respect; it is also quite evident that this is, fundamentally, a love story between man and water.

Unfortunately, however, these pure instincts are also corrupted throughout the text, which is woefully anglocentric. While it seems a reasonable bet that the reason the Atlantic so captivates our intrepid author and, indeed, his intended audience, is the fact that European and North American countries (currently) exert such international prowess, there seems little excuse to ignore Africa when it isn't, you know, spawning civilization or, more criminally, the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas when Great Britain isn't fighting to retain that shadow of its former empire cast in the Falkland Islands. Even worse, he makes assertions that are patently untrue and which offended even my far-from-delicate sensibilities; at one point, Winchester seriously suggests- no, asserts- that the Atlantic was the first of the world's oceans to be crossed. This is mind-numbingly stupid at its very best, as the Pacific Islands were discovered, explored, and settled long before Columbus. And it is not only this galling lapse that betrays a myopic devotion to the Atlantic that hampers Winchester's ode and actually works to diminish the Atlantic as readers frantically search to undermine the author's interminable single-mindedness. Here, then, is a case of tragically wasted potential, a book that I wanted to be engrossed by but which only served to frustrate and actively foil my attempts to like or engage with it. There is good information here, to be sure; there are excellent stories, and despite Winchester's mishandling, the idea of telling the story of the Atlantic as a, or perhaps even the, formative ocean of the modern world remains compelling. It's just a shame that Atlantic can't quite do the subject justice.

Grade: C+

Book 21: The Living Great Lakes

The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas
Jerry Dennis

As I will shortly be leaving for Ireland, I decided to read about a subject very close to home: HOMES, or the Great Lakes. Though told with a somewhat uneasy combination of science, memoir, and history, The Living Great Lakes presents a loving homage to some of the planet's most astonishing (and perhaps under-appreciated) natural features. I remember once asking my mom why, if Lake Michigan was indeed a lake, I couldn't see Wisconsin from Grand Haven; she replied that the lake is almost as wide as Indiana. It's impossible to think of these lakes in any traditional framework, a fact that Dennis makes clear time and again throughout the book, particularly when he elicits the opinions of long-time oceangoing sailors who hadn't been on the Great Lakes before- the hardened salts are uniformly amazed at the power of these inland bodies. Dennis recounts these and other facts with a gushing sense of pride that borders between sincerity and self-aggrandizement; he is guilty of the latter particularly when mentioning time and again his lifelong credentials from living near the lake. It is, however, clear that the book is a labor of love, and his feelings for the lakes and the environment drive the book and serve to connect its sometimes straining threads of narrative.

The heart of the book is the oft-interrupted story of a journey from Traverse City to Maine, through the bottom four lakes, the Erie canal, and the Atlantic Ocean aboard a sailing ship. This story itself is fascinating, though non-sailors would benefit from a small glossary of jargon that is alternately defined condescendingly within the text or left ambiguous for non-sailors. Unfortunately, this narrative becomes increasingly tired as the text wears on, penetrated more often and for longer periods by side narratives that often appear out of nowhere and bear no discernible relation to the narrative framing it. Each chapter is at its head divided into constituent parts (a la Democracy in America), but within the text itself these divisions are ambiguous and often confusing, as they leap back and forth in time without a discernible anchor. Aside from a few uninteresting asides (particularly the repetitive environmental studies, which certainly have their place but are presented in a disjointed manner that makes Dennis come across as annoying), background information and even unrelated stories from Dennis's own experiences intersect well with the main sailing story and do provide a comprehensive, multi-layered view of the Great Lakes region.

The strength of The Living Great Lakes is its scope, as Dennis as narrator/memoirist eventually becomes tiresome. His forays into the geological, economic, political, and environmental history of the Great Lakes may not always be well integrated, but combine well to make the book an excellent introduction/love song to the area. Passion shines through every word of this book, for both better and worse, and the book is enjoyable for its thoughtfulness and for the very earnestness that sometimes sinks the prose under its own weight. Particularly informative are early chapters on Lakes Michigan and Superior, those with which Dennis is most familiar and whose identities are most strongly connected with Michigan. Historical asides on explorers such as La Salle and tributes to the many victims of intricately described weather patterns (such as the famous Edmund Fitzgerald) find a home amidst personal narrative, scientific exploration, and political pronouncement. The voyage of The Living Great Lakes can get a bit bumpy with a lack of clear transitions and some repetitive content, but it is nonetheless a moving testament to these powerful bodies of water that so thoroughly define the land and people they touch.

Grade: B+