The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World

The 1,200 photographs in this book are, for the most part, mouth-watering, and I like the egalitarian design (the countries are listed in alphabetical order, and each one gets two pages, no matter the size or population or relative fame). A word to the easily offended: there are several photos of bare-breasted women and at least one of nude children.

Certainly this book whets a person's appetite for international travel. As a travel guide it's not very useful, since there's only bits of information on each nation, but it's wonderful browsing and would probably be good for people trying to make up their minds on where they want to go.

There was a time when I used to flip through this book almost nightly! Pairs fun, surprisingly useful information with excellent photographs, really capturing the "feel" of all the countries. Still on my bookshelf.

Read: April 2020

This was a bittersweet read at a time when we are under coronavirus lockdown. Full of beautiful photographs and plenty of information, this has given me lots of travel inspiration for the future.

Unlike the usual coffee-table books that I just leaf through, I found this interesting enough to read from cover to cover. There's a decent mix of dry data seasoned with factoids, both important and trivial, and great photos. In fact, I enjoyed it so much in the original 2004 edition that when it was reissued, revised and updated in 2010, I bought that as well.

Because this covers every country in the world, it is obviously by necessity a quick glance at each country, but if you enjoy travel or the world in which we live, it's still a fun overview of exactly what's out there.

This book is absolutely amazing! Each country has its own set of two pages describing all the unique and interesting facts. The pictures are stunning and bring the text to life.

This is a fantastic book that is always on my coffee table. I love to browse through it with a cup of coffee on a rainy Sunday morning. Very inspiring!