Holidays After The Fall

Every summer season, the sun-drenched coasts of Bulgaria and Croatia turn into densely inhabited, intensively exploited tourism industry hotspots. This book traces the various architectural and urban planning strategies pursued there since the mid 1950s, in order first to create then to further develop modern holiday destinations. It focusses on individual resorts and outstanding buildings have been economically and physically restructured, in a myriad of ways, leaving a legacy of deserted ruins, cautious renovations, exorbitant conversions and on-going public protest.

In Anthropology of Tourism in Central and Eastern Europe: Bridging Worlds, Sabina Owsianowska and Magdalena Banaszkiewicz examine the limitations of the anthropological study of tourism, which stem from both the domination of researchers representing the Anglophone circle as well as the current state of tourism studies in Central and Eastern Europe. This edited collection contributes to the wider discussion of the geopolitics of knowledge through its focus on the anthropological background of tourism studies and its inclusion of contributors from Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, and Poland.

Throughout life, you stand at many crossroads, where you have to make a choice--you have to go left or right. For the most part, one convinces oneself that the choices one makes and the decisions one makes are made on the basis of rational and sensible considerations, but often it is our emotions that ultimately make the difference. Other times, it is some external circumstances or coincidences that determine whether one is going to follow the path to the left or to the right. For most people, it doesn't matter much which way they follow; most get where they want to go, perhaps with a few knubs, but rarely life-threatening. In this book, we follow a little Iranian boy--Kioumars--from the age of four until he, as a middle-aged man, writes his memoirs as a Danish citizen in a suburb of Copenhagen. For him, conscious choices, coincidences, or external circumstances have several times meant life or death or vastly different life courses. The book takes us to a newly built neighborhood in Tehran, where we follow family life closely for better and worse, described with a lovely sense of humor. After the revolution, Kioumars flees, and the trip through the mountains to the Turkish border and the wait in Turkey is nerve-wracking. The final destination is Denmark, where he encounters a very different culture in a welfare society that surprises him and presents challenges. In the book, Kioumars looks back on his life and on all the crossroads he has stood by. Several times, coincidences have saved his life; coincidences also led him to Denmark and not to the United States, which was originally his great wish; not wanting to participate in the Iraq War was a conscious choice and led to the escape, and later it was external circumstances that changed Kioumars's life radically as he did not flee but moved from Iran to Denmark. The book is written humorously and unsentimentally but is still experienced as a heartbreaking tale of being a refugee and leaving his homeland and settling into a new culture.

The 1950s and 1960s were a transformative period in Britain, and an important part of this was how Britons’ lives were changed when they began flying abroad for their holidays. In A World Away Michael John Law investigates how something that previously only the rich could afford became available to working-class holidaymakers. A World Away moves beyond the big players in the tourist industry and technical accounts of the airplanes used by tour operators to tell the histories of the people who were there, both tourists and tour guides, using their personal testimonies. Until now there has been uncertainty about the identity of these new tourists: some feared they were working-class intruders who might invade the pristine destinations favoured by the elite; others claimed that most were from the middle class. Using new data derived from flight accident investigations, Law explains the complex origins of these new flyers. In British society this unprecedented mobility could not go unpunished, and the new tourists were lampooned in books and newspapers aimed at the middle classes. Law shows how popular culture, movies, and music influenced the decision to travel, and what actually happened when these new holidaymakers went abroad. Law investigates the package tour industry from its mid-century origins through its inherent weaknesses, governmental interference, and unforeseen world events that contributed to its partial failure in the early 1970s. A World Away provides the definitive account of this important change in postwar British society.