DT & Toys, Warsaw, books

Hello subscribers!

As promised after the result of our latest theme poll that came with the previous newsletter, I composed a post on the winning theme, Dark Tourism & Toys, and uploaded it on Thursday. It featured the rather bizarre “Atom Rocket” in the photo above (a plaything from the early Atomic Age), plus 20 more photos of toys that in various ways have some connection with dark tourism, either by virtue of being war toys displayed in military museums, or because of where they were found, such as those toys in the abandoned kindergarten of Kopachi in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Also featured were various soft toys, either regular ones left as mementoes at memorials, or themselves dark, such as the fluffy E. coli bacterium or the fluffy Challenger space shuttle that had featured before on this blog not so long ago. More controversial were an Adolf-Hitler puzzle, an English Execution slot machine, and two items seen in the shop at Moscow’s Museum of the Great Patriotic War, namely a scale-model kit of the Kursk submarine that had so tragically sunk in 2000, and a toy Buk rocket launcher (the Russian anti-aircraft missile type used in the downing of Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014).
  

Other than on the blog, I mostly worked on finalizing the Warsaw chapters for my main website that were still outstanding. That is now done. The Warsaw base text is updated and three new subchapters were added, namely for Marszałkowska boulevard with its fabulous socialist-realist artwork relics, the Life under Communism Museum, as well as the open-air part of the Polish Army Museum. Some of the other subchapters were also given updated photo galleries.

That’s Poland now finished, next I have to turn to filling the numerous gaps my website still has for the Somme, Ypres and Verdun, and also set up stand-in stub chapters for the destinations I had planned to travel to last year, and then this year, namely in Taiwan and Namibia. That’ll keep me busy for months to come (it’s over three dozen chapters to write from scratch). I just hope I can get all that done before my book comes out in September. That’s because in the book all these places are already covered and I claim in the introduction that more details for every one of them can be found on my website – so I have to work on fulfilling that promise. Normally that shouldn’t be a problem with over five months to go, but it could be that the publishers of my book want me to get started on preparing the German version sooner than expected, which will obviously also require quite a bit of time.
  

Speaking of books, I am currently writing a review of a book I was sent by a different publisher, namely the very first German-language monograph on the topic of dark tourism. I’ve finished reading it this week and can already reveal that it’s mostly very good (a few annoying clichés and omissions aside) and I’d say it could also be a good addition to the English-language market. So it would be great if someone could translate it. I’d offer to do it if it wasn’t for my own book that I absolutely have to give priority. Anyway, as soon as the review is finished and uploaded to my website, I’ll send the link, hopefully in the next newsletter.
  

But that’s it for today.
  

Have a good week, stay safe, and until next Sunday!
  

Best,

Peter