In spite of my power pop predilections, I’m excited to get my hands on a copy of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, a new book by history professor Mark LeVine. The New York Times praised the book for offering “the hit-and-run pleasures of a lively road trip.” The book will eventually be complemented by a film, although few details are available online as of yet.

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That’s the number of journalists killed around the globe this year—the most in over a decade. Not surprisingly, Iraq claimed more lives than any other country, 31, nearly all of them Iraqi. “Somalia was ranked the second deadliest country with seven journalists deaths in 2007,” Reuters reports. “Sri Lanka and Pakistan each recorded five journalists deaths, and Afghanistan and Eritrea each had two deaths.” One positive note: For the first time in more than a decade, there wasn’t a single reporter murdered in Colombia. Could it be further evidence of this?

Lisbon, Portugal (pictured) and the rest of Europe are top of mind this week—particularly Europe on the cheap. The Big Apple, the debut of Virgin America and the Island of Tiki round out the Zeitgiest. Have a look.

“Hot This Week” Destination
Yahoo! (this week)
Lisbon, Portugal

Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
10 Ways to Keep Europe Within Reach
* We’ve unearthed some fine tips, too.

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
10 Ways to Keep Europe Within Reach

Most Popular Travel Podcast
iTunes (current)
Beautiful Places with Tony Farley
* This week: North Dome

Most Read Feature
World Hum (posted this week)
James Teitelbaum: Escape to the Isle of Tiki

Most Viewed Travel Story
Telegraph UK (current)
New York Shopping: The Best of the Big Apple

Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (posted this week)
How I Scored a New U.S. Passport in One Day

Most Viewed Travel Story
Los Angeles Times (current)
Virgin America Returns the Frills to Flying

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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has had a busy few weeks. Not only was it busy issuing a press release claiming no affiliation with the new seven wonders, during meetings in Christchurch, New Zealand, the group added the Galapagos and their surrounding marine reserve; Samarra, Iraq; and Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park to its list of endangered World Heritage sites. Two more sites—the Royal Palaces of Abomey, Benin and Kathmandu Valley, Nepal—were removed from the Danger List. 

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The Zeitgeist spans the globe this week, as travelers consider daredevil skiing, the world’s most dangerous city and changes to an old-media island.

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
For Daredevil Skiing, the Season Is Now
* It’s slush-time at Tuckerman Ravine in New Hampshire

Best Tourists in the World
Expedia Survey of European Hoteliers (current)
Japanese tourists
* And the worst: French tourists

Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (this week)
One Day in the World’s Most Dangerous City
* A snapshot of a day in Baghdad from Spiegel Online

Most Viewed Travel Story
Los Angeles Times (current)
Landing of Airbus A380 jet at LAX should be huge
* Seriously? Talk about old news.

Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Disney’s Tom Sawyer Island: Too Old Media for 2007

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Five hidden, affordable beach destinations
* No, Mexico City’s faux playa didn’t make the list

Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Farecast
* Promising “free and accurate airfare predictions”

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It’s not a new idea, visiting the countries U.S. President George W. Bush dubbed the “Axis of Evil.” Ben Anderson, for instance, did it several years ago, and the BBC broadcast several programs based on his travels. Now Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler has written “Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil,” in which he chronicles his travels through Bush’s original three “axis” countries—Iran, Iraq and North Korea—plus Afghanistan, Albania, Burma, Cuba, Libya and Saudi Arabia. 

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Travelers appear top of mind this week, not destinations. The journeys of Daisann McLane, Bill Bryson, Paulina Porizkova, Martin Sargent, celebrity watchers and Dora the Explorer lead off the Zeitgeist.

Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Daisann McLane: ‘Learning Cantonese’ in Hong Kong

Most Popular Travel Podcast
iTunes (current)
Travel Song Medley by Dora the Explorer

Most Read Story
World Hum (this week)
Paulina Porizkova: A Model Traveler

Most Read Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Oscars Tourism: Celebrity Sightings and a Hotel Within Gawking Distance of the Red Carpet

Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
* We like this book.

Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (current)
Area-Daily.com Launches

Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Farecast

Top Travel and Adventure Audiobook
iTunes (current)
A Walk in the Woods

Most Dugg Travel Podcast
Digg (current)
Martin Sargent: Web Drifter

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I’m accustomed to seeing TV commercials promoting vacations in places like New Zealand and Canada. So when I saw the commercial on CNN the other day touting travel to Kurdistan, I thought, of course, Kurdistan? Today, the AP explains the commercial’s origins. It turns out a California firm helped make the commercial for the Kurdistan Development Corp.

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Raed Jarrar says he was forced to remove a T-shirt with the words “We will not be silent” in both Arabic and English before boarding a Jet Blue flight from New York to California earlier this month. According to a BBC report, Jarrar was told “a number of passengers had complained about his T-shirt—apparently concerned at what the Arabic phrase meant—and asked him to remove it.” Jarrar first refused, then, according to his blog post about the incident, he wore a grey T-shirt with the words “New York” bought for him by a Jet Blue representative. 

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All this week Slate is featuring excerpts from Rory Stewart’s new book The Prince of the Marshes, which focuses on his experiences as the Governor of Maysan province in southern Iraq. Stewart is also the author of the acclaimed The Places in Between, a chronicle of his walk across Afghanistan in 2002.

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1991
Territory covered: The Middle East
The Middle East is a region that is constantly in the news, though amidst all the headlines and analysis coming from the area, it is rare that we ever learn about the lives of the people who dwell there. Published shortly after the beginning (and rapid end) of the first Gulf War, Baghdad Without a Map collects Horwitz’s dispatches from places like Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Sudan to paint a multi-faceted human face on a region that is too often obscured by crisis-driven news stories. Indeed, the reader can’t help but consider the contradictions of the Middle East when Horwitz chats with an Iranian protester who—in-between chants of “Death to America!”—claims that his dream has always been to visit Disneyland and “take my children on the tea-cup ride.” Serious, funny and empathetic at the same time, Horwitz uses simple tales (shopping for a popular stimulant in Yemen, for instance, or attending a belly-dancing gig in Egypt) to introduce us to hospitable people whose lives are being shaped by old social forces (religion, politics, poverty) as well as new ones (modernity, media, globalization).

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Although we Americans are famously lacking in world geography knowledge, there has always been one surefire way we could learn a country’s place on the map: by attacking it, or at least intervening in its affairs. When that happens, our newspapers feature little regional maps with the country colored black, and our TV news shows offer up little glowing maps in the right-hand corner of our television screens. But now, sadly, even this extreme educational method is failing. Reports CNN: “After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed.”

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