Choice Review

This slender volume approaches tourism as both a cultural phenomenon and the world's "biggest" industry. To this end, successive chapters range from explorations of the existential underpinnings of the need to travel through psychological needs for self-exploration and discovery to the crass pragmatics of marketing, consuming, and impacts of the tourist industry. Such an ambitious agenda touches on Eliade and myths, Barthes and semiotics, Baudrillard and the simulacrum of hyperreality, Lyotard and postmodernism, Urry and the tourist gaze, and Bakhtin and the carnivalesque. And all of that in only the first 50 pages! What follows is less challenging: four chapters passing lightly over matters of tourism's impacts, advertising, travel writing, and case studies. Surely, the impact of possible global terrorism and disease pandemics on the new world of tourism needs more attention than a couple of paragraphs in a volume claiming to assess the industry as a whole. All in all, this volume attempts to do too much and accomplishes too little. It glosses over important issues and spends too much time on peripheral ones. The meager bibliography reflects these deficiencies. ^BSumming Up: Optional. General collections and students. B. Osborne Queen's University at Kingston