From the authors of best-selling Molvana comes another hilarious send-up of the always-culturally sensitive travel guide. Whether you'd prefer to taste the Phaic Tanese dish guoman (a local duck delicacy whereby the bird is plucked, rolled in spices, and slowly roasted over hot coals before being brought to the table and killed), or go brown-water rafting on the mudslides of the heavily deforested jungles of the north, or gain insight into the unusual customs of the Phaic Tanese people (Phaic Tanese men will often touch a blonde-headed child because so doing is believed to bring gold, and will likewise touch the breasts of a blonde-headed woman because so doing is believed to bring pleasure), Jetlag's travel guide is the essential guide for the undiscerning traveler. A fascinating land of contrasts with one foot in the past and another striding determinedly forward, Phaic Tan truly is a nation going in circles.

This text explores tourism websites as mediums of identity construction and promotion. As interactive modes of communication, tourism websites for nations, cities, and attractions function critically in the new capitalism as calls for social action in contributing to economic and social rebirth, growth, and preservation.

This volume is based on the recognition that heritage is popular and popular culture is now readily transformed into heritage whose meanings and myths reshape social life and political and economic realities as well as re-make “tradition.” The papers in this volume consider: What does popular heritage look like? To whom does it speak? Is it active in dissolving class and cultural boundaries or just in reproducing new ones? How do societies manage a heritage that is fluid, immediate and that straddles extremes of serious conflict and hedonistic frivolity? When/under what circumstances is the creation and expression of new cultural forms – popular culture – capable of being transformed into heritage?.

The funniest book about travel you will ever read: a travel guide to the fictional European republic 'Molvania', birthplace of the polka and whooping cough. The text and design draw on the standard travel guide format and include: background information on the destination, including cultural details, useful phrases, holidays, and calendar of events; accommodation and restaurant listings; activities and excursions; as well as text break-outs, colour photos and maps throughout.

This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of travel guidebooks and their conceptualisation, use and impact. Guidebooks have been key tourism paraphernalia for almost two centuries and although researched in some areas, academic knowledge on guidebooks in tourism has not been expansively communicated. The uncritical, unreflective and largely pejorative approach to guidebooks in the public sphere, and to some degree also present in academia, is reassessed in this book. This challenges the current limited tourism research approaches to the topic, including the routinely held assumption that the internet has all but destroyed the printed guidebook. This book will be a useful resource for postgraduate students and researchers in tourism and tourism communications and consumption.

Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises—climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes—means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools—technological and otherwise—and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.