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High SeasonHow One French Riviera Town Has Seduced Travelers for Two Thousand YearsBy Robert KanigelThis year read these incredibly colorful stories of what happens when travel destinations, travelers, travel readers, and travel-bugged people alike embark into a world that covers two mellenia of High Season excitement. High Season offers a probing look at the transforming power of the tourist industry in one small destination of the world. This book draws on primary sources that cover two mellenia of interesting destinations adored by everyone. What pleasure we experience when escaping across the ages by reading the wonderful High Season stories of one place: the prince jewel of the French Riviera. Robert Kanigel, using his sources and remarkable travel diaries, memoirs, postcards home, scholarly studies, and guidebooks traces the history that turns into intrigue. Nice began as a small Greek outpost, long before it became the world’s richest destination. Part Italian and part French, Nice was a stop on the aristocratic Grand Tour, a home-away-from-home for expatriates F. Scott Futzgerald, Isadora Duncan, and others, a place of convalescence for soldiers wounded during World War II, a site of Gestapo round-ups of Jews, and most recently a vacation spot for clerks from Paris, software engineers from Silicon Valley and nouveau capitalists from Moscow. HIGH SEASON is an intelligent journey through history while the streets of Nice vividly demonstrate why it reigned as queen of the Riviera. It tells of the lessons learned by the once-modest medieval town apply to the Nantuckets, Venices, Aspens, and Salzburgs of the world. The book is rich in soft airs, benign sun, and sea beauty. Kanigel’s portrait stands for all of the tourist meccas of the world; for every exotic haven which suffers tension between visitor and host; for every tourist destination that has risen to popularity, peaked, and wondered what to do next. Look behind the façade of leisure and luxury, Kanigel tells all the history of travel and tourism through the eyes of the famous resorts. He explores what pleasure escape meant to the tourists of the past, and what it represents to the tourists of today. He pauses along the way to consider how the modern tourists evolution, budget, and environment otherwise exacted on the world’s celebrated travel destinations. Kanigel, as a professor in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies is author, chronicler of struggles and triumphs of great men at work, and with HIGH SEASON he turns his leisure playful gaze on the proverbial escape vacationing can bring. Look for HIGH SEASONS in local book stores everywhere, or contact: VIKING, a member of Penguin Putman, Inc. Reviewed by Karen Devine |
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