World Monuments: 50 Irreplaceable Sites To Discover, Explore, and Champion

by André Aciman, Anne Applebaum, William Dalrymple

A stunning tour of 50 of the world’s most extraordinary destinations selected from the World Monuments Fund’s most important sites of global heritage. In commemoration of its 50th anniversary, the World Monuments Fund has commissioned some of today’s most important writers to give voice to the organization’s work around the world over the past 50 years. Curated by the International Center of Photography, the book features striking images from renowned photographers, including Edward Burtynsky, Tiina Itkonen, Erich Lessing, Gideon Mendel, and Sebastião Salgado.
In essence, this is a bucket list for the educated traveler—armchair or otherwise. From Venice and Petra to New Orleans and Angkor, Easter Island to the Tempel Synagogue in Kraków, Poland, to the Mughal Gardens of Agra, India, to the Chancellerie d’Orléans in Paris, World Monuments presents 50 of the world’s most compelling destinations, cultural heritage sites, and significant architectural works that must be seen and preserved.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 29, 2015

About the author

André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, has taught at Princeton and Bard and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center.

Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and a novel Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010

Reviews

[Karla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely powerful images with supportive background text. Engaging and inspiring.

[Meenakshisankar M · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I picked up this book, I expected it to be a collection of 50 popular world monuments with pictures and information. However, it actually turned out to be a collection of erudite essays pertaining to important challenges facing preservation of monuments in the world currently - whether it is due to natural disasters, rapid urbanization, war and related political reasons, etc. Using that framing, the book talks about 50 monument sites across the world, outlining the efforts by World Monuments Fund in preserving them and the ongoing challenges. The layout design of the pages could have been much better, it was largely confusing to follow the essay while also reading about the interspersed monument details.

[Pádraic · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps fitting when it's to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the World Monuments Fund, this book is filled with many words rhapsodising their numerous Good Works over the years. This is not to say that they aren't indeed good works, just that the tone quickly becomes tiresome. Great photos, though.

[Jim Blessing · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had some interesting pictures, but not much else.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

i found the layout of this book very confusing, but the images were pretty :) don't know how this one got on my list...