Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2013: Tourism is on track to become the world's biggest business. In Overbooked, Elizabeth Becker, senior foreign editor at NPR and a former New York Times correspondent, uses tourism as a lens through which to explore the current geopolitical landscape. As much as Overbooked travels across countries, it also travels through time: Becker looks at tourism's past (popularized by the French in the '50s!), where it is today (the prevalence of resort and cultural travel), and its future (China's rise as both a destination and a source of tourists). As much economic development as tourism brings, Becker consistently sees a dark side to the industry's rapid growth. She writes, "Tourism is one of those double-edged swords that may look like an easy way to earn desperately needed money but can ravage wilderness areas and undermine native cultures to fit into package tours." --Kevin Nguyen