Book Review, Dark Tourism: Lennon & Foley - Essay Example

5). The authors argue that “dark tourism” is a part of post-modernity, in which the initial interest in these events and deaths are created by global communication technologies; the dark tourism objects are a source of anxiety and doubt about modernity, such as the fact that the Titanic sank, despite allegedly being unsinkable, and how technological innovations were introduced to undertake the Jewish Holocaust; and third, that these sites are a tourism product, so they combine commodification and commercial ethic (Lennon & Foley, 2000, p. 11). The overall thesis of the book is that “global communication technologies are inherent in both the events which are associated with a dark tourism product and are present in the representation of the events for visitors at the site itself (Lennon & Foley, 2000, p. 16). The book begins by a review of different sites that are the object of dark tourism, and how global technologies affected the events and the representations of these events.

For instance, the authors notes that the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 represented the first time that global communications technologies were able to be harnessed in order to spread a piece of tragic news throughout the globe in an instantaneous fashion, and this type of coverage was carried through in the deaths of Senator Robert Kennedy and Princess Diana of Wales. (Lennon & Foley, 2000, p. 17). This kind of coverage was preceded by the coverage of the Titanic, which, while it obviously did not have same instantaneous spread as did the assassination of John F.

Kennedy, it nevertheless was groundbreaking for the way that news of Titanic spread around the globe (Lennon & Foley, 2000, p. 17). The viewpoint then shifts a bit towards rationality, anxiety and doubt, which are hallmarks of the post-modern age. The authors argue that rational aspects of post-modern life, such as the language of bureaucracy, planning and problem-solving, which are used in corporate strategies, were the same rational elements that were used by the Nazis in their extermination of the Jews.

Moreover, other events, such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Dresden fire-bombing in 1945 and the trench warfares in France and Belgium between 1914 and 1918 all required post-modern technologies, planning approaches and military-industrial complexes (Lennon & Foley, 2000, p. 22). Therefore, the tourism to these and other sites can at least be partially explained by the fact that they took rational modern inventions and turned them into nefarious purposes, which highlights the fears and ambivalence that the modern public has about the modern age and the supposedly rational and benign inventions that can be used for dark means.

The author then takes the reader through specific sites and the possible motivation of tourists for going to these sites. Included is the Third Reich and The Final Solution and the sites related to these. Of these, the concentration camp of Dachau is one of the most popular sites, with 900,000 visitors every year (Lennon & Foley, 2000, p. 40). The authors state that the reason for the popularity of the site, despite the fact that the camp itself was not one of the major extermination camps of the Nazi regime is due to the influence of the media, as well as its “geographical proximity and its place in the collective memory of the camps’