1,000 Places to See Before You Die

As a professional travel writer of more than 35 years, I marvel that this book can garner such disparate reviews - people love it (5 stars) or hate it (1 star). The latter would do well to read the author's intro where she explains that these are not the only one thousand places to see in this huge and fascinating world of ours. They are the places that make up her own Life List, and in my opinion she is right on the dime. Would these be my one thousand? The truth is - who would ever have the time, passion and experience to draw up such a list to compare? Ms. Schultz has done it for us and she deserves a gold star. This is my trade, and know what a nightmare it is to organize a book one fourth this size, and then include all the info (distances, contacts, best-time-to-go info etc) to get you there. Are we all convinced we could do it better? Ask the one-star reviewers - but let's see them try.

Where to go next? Why? When to go? How to get there? The passion and patience the author sustained for the many years it took to compile this travel bible is mind boggling. They are her thousand top picks - not mine and maybe not yours. But no one has ever tried to put it all between two covers and so successfully (in my opinion). Man is a list-making animal - Top Museums, Top Adventures, Top Golf Resorts. But this personal life list tries to be a little bit of everything - everywhere - for all traveling types, and the close-to-thousand pages mix the humble with the magnificent, the fast food with the gastonomic temples, the just plain fun with those magical and spiritual places of the world to be revered. I've been to a great number of these places and the author is right on the mark - and I can only imagine I can expect the same success with those she writes about so beautifully.

I have been professionally traveling for 35 years and for personal reasons twice that. Yes this 900-page travel bible features a lot of (historical, must-see and unusual) hotels, but there are so very many more museums (the world's biggest and best and the small gems too), festivals (a betrothal festival in in Morocco's Atlas Mountains and the Spoleto Festivals in both Spoleto, Italy and Charleston USA), food experiences (the Maine Lobster Festival and George Blanc in France) and sites of natural beauty (the Grand Tetons, Patagonia, Cappodocia in Turkey, Italy's Dolomite Mountains, Connemara in Ireland) - oh and I could go on and on....as Patricia Schultz does. You can never please everyone all the time, but no one has ever come as close as this intrepid author, and with a lovely and easy to read prose that should awaken the adventurer and explorer in all of us. I gave 20 of these books away as Christmas gifts and now have 20 best friends who are still talking about the best gift they ever received.

I have owned books like this before. Some have just boring predictable suggestions for places to visit (Paris, Rome, Sydney etc,) while others have a bland guidebook type of narrative. Schultz's compilation is a tightly researched work with fascinating trivia about the places he recommends, and there are plenty of places you wouldn't have thought about, and its got pictures to speak for themselves! Makes for quite a handy gift item too, which is why I bought it initially, but liked it so much I decided to keep it for myself. Delectable!