An Atlas of Extinct Countries

Author/Guide: Gideon Defoe

Why a Booktrail?

There are countries which used to exist which don’t anymore. Well, not unless you look for them….

ISBN: B084GJMN8R
Genre: Nature/Landscape, Non-Fiction

Comment

What you need to know before your trail

‘Countries are just daft stories we tell each other. They’re all equally implausible once you get up close’

Countries die. Sometimes it’s murder, sometimes it’s by accident, and sometimes it’s because they were so ludicrous they didn’t deserve to exist in the first place. Occasionally they explode violently. A few slip away almost unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either ‘got too greedy’ or ‘Napoleon turned up’. Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence.

Locations

Reset

South America
C: Argentina/Chile - Patagonia

Asia
D: Vietnam/Sedang

Travel Guide

A map of the nations which have disappeared

The ones in the book include:

Sarawak, Bavaria, Corsica, Sonora,Patagonia, Fiume and Sedang. There is an interesting system here as well for discovering exactly where you are in the world or identifying any place you can think of with just three words.

This is an atlas of nations that fell off the map. The polite way of writing an obituary is: dwell on the good bits, gloss over the embarrassing stuff. This book fails to do that. And that is mainly because most of these dead nations (and a lot of the ones that are still alive) are so weird or borderline nonsensical that it’s impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff.

The life stories of the sadly deceased involve a catalogue of chancers, racists, racist chancers, conmen, madmen, people trying to get out of paying tax, mistakes, lies, stupid schemes and General Idiocy. Because of this – and because treating nation states with too much respect is the entire problem with pretty much everything – these accounts are not fussed about adding to all the earnest flag saluting in the world, however nice some of the flags are.