... a creative, philosophical study of travel ... This beautiful English translation updates the 2017 Italian edition of the book to reflect the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on travel. It’s perfect for thoughtful travelers stuck with passports that are burning a hole in their pockets ... Diverse and fascinating sources, historical literature, theory, and contemporary data are artfully brought together to form this intellectually demanding, but also playful, work ... Fun and challenging, Marc d’Eramo’s The World in a Selfie mixes the flavors of Mark Twain, Karl Marx, and theme parks to result in a real and welcome trip elsewhere.
Marco D'Eramo's thought-provoking The World in a Selfie: An Inquiry into the Tourist Age...is a thorough and often critical look at modern tourism through a variety of sociological lenses ... He creates a salon-like atmosphere of noted thinkers and writers, synthesizing hundreds of years of thought about interpreting the world through travel ... This is an intriguing book for sociologists and economists, as well as for serious travelers wishing to understand their impact as they once again move about the globe.
D’Eramo...brings into clearer focus the many confounding aspects of tourism: why we hate tourists and yet continue to travel, and why we divvy our leisure time into a structured regimen of sightseeing that resembles something like work ... This is where D’Eramo is at his best, dissecting the consequences of seemingly simple activities, and the impact of travel on the world at large. The World in a Selfie is digressive, the chapters like a series of meditations that touch on various aspects of travel and tourism ... His work is at times densely philosophical...but also whimsical ... The World in a Selfie is occasionally disjointed, but this alternation between objects of inquiry is also part of its charm and provides us with a sense of tourism’s broad reach.
The book, 'an inquiry into the tourist age,' is somewhat disjointed, moving distractedly at times from topic to topic and losing the thread in the philosophical weeds. But in its more focused moments, Selfie makes for a bracing, provocative examination of an all-too-human pastime ... his commentary on the unintended consequences of preservation is compelling ... Mr. D’Eramo’s refreshingly polemical if sometimes crotchety book should at least goad us to be more mindful of the pitfalls we propagate as tourists when, hallelujah, we can finally travel again.
