The last resort A chronicle of paradise, profit, and peril at the beach

Review by Booklist Review

Journalist, travel writer, and founder of the digital magazine Flung, Stodola (Process, 2015) guides readers through the history of beach resorts, places that once frightened local populations, then marketed themselves as curative locales, becoming playgrounds for the wealthy and now de rigueur honeymoon destinations. She visits numerous global properties in various stages of what one geographer called "tourist area cycle evolution"--exploration, involvement, development, consolidation, stagnation, decline, and occasionally rejuvenation--and shares her findings. Invariably, natural beauty, once "discovered" by Westerners, is exploited and even endangered, as the quest for paradise and commercial endeavors to create the perfect beach wreak havoc on environmental, social, and economic fronts around the world. Stodola details both the disastrous effects of overdevelopment on multiple beachfront sites as well as hopeful instances of conservation, charting the steps needed to curtail the devastating consequences of unchecked development: difficult, expensive measures that may save a quite different beach resort for future generations. Avid travelers and environmentally conscious readers alike will appreciate this treatment.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Beaches are "a paradise both threatening and threatened," according to this thought-provoking survey from journalist Stodola (Process). Though tourism is "the third-largest export globally" and "provides more than one in every ten jobs worldwide," Stodola travels the globe to highlight how coastal towns that largely depend on tourism are changing due to climate change and have become hotbeds of social inequality. In Nicaragua, she explores how the country's reputation went from one of "violence" to one with a "part hipster vacation scene, part groovier WeWork," and in Tulum, Mexico, she takes in the damage caused by overdevelopment: "Tulum has become a study in paradoxes, where 'eco-resorts' run on bungalow-size diesel generators, their waste seeping through the delicate limestone ground into the vast underground river system." Throughout, Stodola shows the effects of, as well as coastal towns' response to, climate change: Sea walls are built in Barbados to combat erosion, and roads are raised in Miami Beach as the tides reach ever higher. Stodola wraps up with steps the tourism industry can take to make for more "durable and inclusive" beach resorts, including sourcing food and drink locally and limiting the numbers of visitors. The result is a fascinating look at the dangers of climate change. (June)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Founder and editor of the online travel magazine Flung, Stodola offers a history of beach resort culture, which has led to fun and sun but also irresponsible construction, imbalanced local economies, beach erosion, and a too-heavy carbon footprint. With travel and especially beach culture now an integral part of the globalized world, what happens when rising seas come flooding in? With a 100,000-copy first printing.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A critical look at the juggernaut of vacation destinations: the beach resort. Travel and culture writer Stodola interrogates the cultural devotion to the idea of the beach as the perfect place, which is a modern concept. While the Greeks and Romans enjoyed the seas, by the Middle Ages, Europeans wanted nothing to do with the beach; in the 1800s, early seaside vacationers were lured by potential health benefits rather than a love of surf and sand. What the world today thinks of as paradise is "not nature; paradise is nature conquered, nature tamed." It is far away, endlessly photogenic, and rich with entertainment--and it may or may not include a real beach. This shift of focus away from the literal beach is partly one of necessity: Climate change is making the maintenance and preservation of modern beaches as we know them untenable. Overdevelopment of tropical areas to accommodate skyrocketing numbers of tourists frequently pushes the resources of destinations to the limits, and rising water temperatures, erosion, and increasingly frequent and violent storms threaten the very beaches and communities where these resorts are located. Stodola organizes her book according to locations she has visited, detailing both the similarities of beach vacations across the globe as well as regional differences. She acknowledges the Western gaze that has informed much of what constitutes the traveler's ideal, but she also emphasizes that the international traveler base is growing and changing. As the global middle class surges in population, especially in countries such as India and China, destinations will have to learn to accommodate an expanding range of tastes. The Covid-19 pandemic gutted international travel and highlighted weaknesses in the tourism industry that have long existed, particularly the overreliance on tourism as a source of income in destination countries, further emphasizing a need for a more intentional way forward if the beach vacation is to continue. A thorough and appropriately alarming analysis of how we made paradise and how it might be saved. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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