"Featuring more than 100 locations, from ghost towns to amusement parks, roads to railways, hotels to hospitals. From war to chemical disasters, from grand follies to changing fashions, the story behind each striking image is explained."--Page [4] of cover.

Featuring 170 striking photographs, Abandoned Cold War Places is a fascinating visual history of the relics left behind by both sides from the late 1940s to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

"Haunting photographs" - The Wall Street Journal. "Henk van Rensbergen is a hero for urban explorers around the world" - Flanders Today. "As an airline pilot, Belgian-born Henk Van Rensbergen was used to travelling the world. But he found a great way to supersize that passion: hunting for the most wonderful, secret, haunting abandoned places" - CNN. While his crew is resting at the pool, pilot and photographer Henk van Rensbergen explores deserted city palaces, overgrown factories or desolate areas of nature, finding beauty in the decay. This engaging book of photographs, a revised edition with new material, lets us wander through abandoned places, including Abkhazia, a break-away region bordering Georgia and Russia and the newest must-visit for every urban explorer. AUTHOR: Henk Van Rensbergen is the pilot of a Boeing 787 and a pioneering Urban Explorer. For more than 25 years, he has been capturing the most beautiful pictures of desolate and forgotten places. His Abandoned Places picture books (1, 2, 3 and The Photographer's Selection) have been highly successful. SELLING POINTS: * A new selection of the best images from Henk van Rensbergen, an urban explorer pioneer, in a handy format * This revised and expanded edition of his bestselling photo book of unusual places is packed with fascinating new images, including over 50% new material 120 colour, 50 b/w images

Head off to explore the filming location of 12 Monkeys, Michael Jackson's hometown turned ghost town, Berlin's 1936 Olympic Village, deconsecrated churches, forgotten castles, deserted train stations, prisons and mental asylums, a cemetery of rusted locomotives, abandoned steel factories, phantom metro stations, and more -- For 10 years, Sylvain Margaine has traveled the world in search of these forbidden and forgotten places -- An exceptional photographic report on urban decay.

For over ten years, fine art photographer Keith Dotson has explored and photographed abandoned places in black and white. His first photo book, "Unloved and Forgotten: Fine Art Photographs of Abandoned Places," features a selection of the most intriguing and beautiful locations he found in his travels. It includes richly reproduced photographs of abandoned houses, schools, churches, barns, storefronts, and even entire abandoned towns.The book highlights fascinating locations like Adams, Tennessee (home of the infamous Bell Witch legend), and Cairo, Illinois, which has rapidly depopulated and is in the process of becoming abandoned. He offers concise backstories of several locations -- a deserted mining town in Arkansas, a forsaken 1952 Plymouth found crashed against a tree on a steep hillside in the woods, and a derelict high school building with a historic graveyard on its property. Included is a brief history of George L. Mesker and Company, the mail order business that sold ornate, prefabricated ironwork storefronts to small towns across America starting in the 1880s. Mesker storefronts can still be seen on many abandoned (and preserved) buildings. The 48-page book is lavishly illustrated throughout with Dotson's black and white photographs.

A beautiful, lyrical exploration of the places where nature is flourishing in our absence "[Flyn] captures the dread, sadness, and wonder of beholding the results of humanity's destructive impulse, and she arrives at a new appreciation of life, 'all the stranger and more valuable for its resilence.'" --The New Yorker Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl. A lush forest supports thousands of species that are extinct or endangered everywhere else on earth in the Korean peninsula's narrow DMZ. Cal Flyn, an investigative journalist, exceptional nature writer, and promising new literary voice visits the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth that due to war, disaster, disease, or economic decay, have been abandoned by humans. What she finds every time is an "island" of teeming new life: nature has rushed in to fill the void faster and more thoroughly than even the most hopeful projections of scientists. Islands of Abandonment is a tour through these new ecosystems, in all their glory, as sites of unexpected environmental significance, where the natural world has reasserted its wild power and promise. And while it doesn't let us off the hook for addressing environmental degradation and climate change, it is a case that hope is far from lost, and it is ultimately a story of redemption: the most polluted spots on Earth can be rehabilitated through ecological processes and, in fact, they already are.

Book Features: • 32 pages, about 7 inches x 9 inches • Ages 8-14, Grades 3-8 leveled readers • Easy-to-read pages with vibrant photos • Features before, during, and after reading activities • After-reading questions, memory game, and reading activity included Abandoned Places: Have you ever seen an empty city? A ghost town? Let's discover why these places were abandoned and what they look like today in Abandoned Places! Hidden, Lost, And Discovered: Go on an epic journey to explore some of the most interesting places from around the world, their history, and why they were abandoned. Some people may not even know they exist! Reading Made Fun: This 32-page nonfiction book for grades 3–8 features eye-catching photos, hidden histories, and fascinating facts about some of the world's most amazing locations. Leveled Books: Discovering the world's intriguing history will engage readers in this high-interest, easy-reading-level book with before, during, and after reading activities, post-reading questions, a memory game, and more! Why Rourke Educational Media: Since 1980, Rourke Publishing Company has specialized in publishing engaging and diverse non-fiction and fiction books for children in a wide range of subjects that support reading success on a level that has no limits.