"In an era before television and air travel, Burton Holmes -- "The Travelogue Man" as he called himself -- was for many people the only window on the world. Single-handed, he brought the glamour and excitement of foreign lands to Americans unable to go themselves. That excitement is re-created in this magnificent album of his photographs, accompanied by his own writings. Burton Holmes purchased his first camera in 1883, and began a love affair with photography that lasted throughout his 88 years. Almost equaling his passion to capture life on film was a desire to travel, to seek out and record novel experiences. In order to pay for his journeys, Holmes created the travelogue, a spectacle in words and pictures that played to full houses in city after city, attracting both sophisticates and provincials. When Burton Holmes came to town, usually engaging the best theater or concert hall for a week at a time, everyone went to see his magical slides and hear his enthralling lectures. His travelogues were the grand events of the season. This book shows why: no mere sunsets over Pago-Pago, his photographs are powerful observations of life on the move, of people and drama, of history in the making. In his long career, he traveled to nearly every country on the globe. He rode the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Russia while they were still laying the track. He was in Naples in 1906, and recorded Vesuvius' most devastating eruption in modern times. He covered the building of the Panama Canal, the Russo-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion in China. Holmes not only brought these and other events to American audiences, he even presented them in color. In the 1890s, his 3 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch glass slides were exquisitely hand-painted in watercolor by a team of Japanese artists. In later years the painting was done in the United States by artists personally trained by Holmes, work so fine that single-hair ermine brushes had to be used. The results were astonishingly realistic, as can be seen in the full-color reproductions. For the travel buff, the photographer, the historian, this is a book to delight the eye and mind."--