This is an interesting travel atlas. The author has collected a selection of places no one wants to visit. The cursed places fall into three categories, natural, manmade, and supernatural. I learned a lot reading this book, most places I was not familiar with. I wish there were more illustrations and the maps were better. The descriptions are short but are a nice overview if you want to learn more. I was glad to be arm chair traveling to these places

"Oliver Le Carrer brings us a fascinating history and armchair journey to the world's most dangerous and frightful places, complete with vintage maps and period illustrations in a handsome volume.

This alluring read includes 40 locations that are rife with disaster, chaos, paranormal activity, and death. The locations gathered here include the dangerous Strait of Messina, home of the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis; the coal town of Jharia, where the ground burns constantly with fire; Kasanka National Park in Zambia, where 8 million migrating bats darken the skies; the Nevada Triangle in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where hundreds of aircraft have disappeared; and Aokigahara Forest near Mount Fuji in Japan, the world's second most popular suicide location following the Golden Gate Bridge."

This book looks beautiful, and the text was enjoyable and interesting. I wish there had been a little bit more of it, though – more in-depth text, and photos of the places rather than just maps. My geography isn't great and I struggled to understand exactly where some of these places were in the world – the very close-up maps didn't help with that. I love the concept of this and haven't read anything quite like it, but it didn't quite hit the mark for me. I did think it was a good translation though, and even the slightly odd syntax was charming!

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Although I initially received this book from Netgalley in PDF format, it quickly became clear that this was a book that was ultimately ill-served by the digital format. Audio, digital, neither one would suffice for this sort of book. This is a book that needs to be held, containing maps that need to be surveyed and admired. This is a good, hard-cover book that one can enjoy feeling the weight of in your hands. It's an experience, and while it isn't without its faults, it is definitely a book that I found both interesting and engaging once I got a copy that I could hold in my hands.

This book purports itself to be an Atlas of the world's cursed places. This amounts to the book presenting a selection of places cursed by either supernatural means (think the Amityville House), by being ultimately uninhabitable (the unfortunate island of Takuu), or by longstanding tradition that may not even be true (Poveglia.) For someone who isn't overly familiar with these sorts of legends it made for extremely entertaining, provocative, and informative reading.

This book could have been improved by the actual inclusion of pictures of the different places, rather than simply the maps of where they exist. At times it looked as if pictures may be included, but rather than true location shots they were simply sourced images to evoke the ideas of the places in question. I have no complaints about the writing, nor the content itself - I just would have enjoyed a longer book with more illustrations.