WW1, Book, New Poll

Hello subscribers!

On the DT blog, only one short new post has gone up – just now in fact. It’s about the dire situation in the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, which is seriously under-represented in the international media at the moment, while all focus is, if not on Covid, on the similarly depressing developments in Israel and Gaza. But the post has a link to a recent report from inside Mekele, Tigray, which makes for harrowing reading. It touches me especially because I visited Mekele as part of my last overseas trip before the pandemic hit, in January 2020. It would be pretty much impossible, and very much inadvisable anyway, to go there now.

My main focus this week, however, was, again, writing up vastly overdue chapters for my main website, namely about all those World-War-One-related places I visited years ago in France, and up to now hadn’t got round to writing up. I admit, that’s also because I found it harder to relate to the topic of WW1 than to almost any other DT-relevant subject. The more I research it, though, the more insights I’ve gained – and that makes it more interesting than I’ve ever found the topic before. This coming week I’ll upload the next batch of chapters. These are about places in and around Arras north of the Somme as well as a pilgrimage to places associated with Britain’s most celebrated war poet, Wilfred Owen. I’ll provide links in the next newsletter.

But here I shall now return to what I had promised a couple of weeks ago: more tasters from my upcoming book. In earlier newsletters I had already disclosed the cover page and one map spread. The maps are what justifies the book’s title: “Atlas of Dark Destinations”. This time I give you two samples of spreads from the main content pages:  

I’ve picked these pages because they represent all the different features (and also because all the photos on them are my own): in addition to the more or less short chapters about particular places, there’s a country intro text, a stats box, a thematic box text and a list of “others”, i.e. similar places elsewhere that didn’t get a stand-alone chapter in the book but are given at least a short mention, sometimes just in a bullet point list, sometimes with a short descriptive paragraph or sentence, like here. There are 300 proper destination chapters for 90 countries in the book. Also counting all those places mentioned in the various lists brings the total of places covered to almost 800. On my main website, meanwhile, the total count has reached over 950. So I’ll probably break through the magical 1000 mark before the year is out!
  

And finally, let’s have another thematic blog post poll. As before, I’ll give you four topics to choose from. They’re all new ones that haven’t been fielded before:
  

A) dark tourism & food

B) dark tourism & furniture

C) dark tourism & pianos

D) dark tourism & planes

  
Please cast your vote by replying to this newsletter or in a comment on the latest post on the blog stating your choice. The winning theme will be announced in next Sunday’s newsletter and the post about it will go online in the week after that.
  

So much for this time.

Have a good week and stay safe!

Best

Peter