Travel books about Ukraine

(These reviews are of 2 of the travel books that I read before my summer 2005 journey to Ukraine with my mom. It was my her first trip there and my second.)



One of my favorite travel books about Ukraine is Ukraine: The Bradt Travel Guide by Andrew Evans, published by UK's Bradt in spring 2004. The first 5 chapters of the guide provides readers with an overview of the country, some info on Ukraine's turbulent history, culture, etc. I feel these chapters are quite insightful.

Starting with chapter 6 up to chapter 15, the guide moves through travel in different regions of Ukraine - from Kyiv to the Black Sea to Donbas to Galicia. Each chapter gives a little background, offers suggestions for sights, activities, attractions, places to eat, sleep, etc.

The guide wraps up with some suggested reading and a somewhat limited language section. In my opinion, this book is well worth its price for those people planning a trip to this beautiful country.

Another travel book I purchased was Let's Go: Eastern Europe. This expanded 2005 edition includes a new 52-page section about Ukraine by Aaron Litvin. (The total length of the travel guidebook is 974 pages.)

I previewed the book in a brick and mortar store, and later purchased it from an online retailer. Keeping in mind the fact that you can't write much about a huge country in 52 pages, after a few minutes of carefully reading the chapter about Ukraine, I knew I'd be disappointed. Here are a couple of my reasons why:

The back of the book includes a section called the "Glossary" that provides transcriptions, words and phrases for the languages spoken by the peoples of the countries in the guidebook. For some reason, Ukrainian is not included!! What is up with this? Lets see... according to the CIA World Factbook, Ukraine has about 47.4 million people, 67% of whom speak Ukrainian, that's about 31.7 million Ukrainian speakers in Ukraine alone! This is about as many people in Romania and Hungary who speak Romanian and Hungarian (Magyar) combined. Those languages each have their own glossaries. (BTW, Belarusian isn't included either.)

Each country in Let's Go: Eastern Europe has a section written about its food and drink. The chapter on Ukraine includes "bread," transliterated as "hlib" in the text, followed by the Cyrillic spelling. The problem is that the first letter of word for bread is written with the wrong Cyrillic character. The word that Let's Go printed isn't even an actual word. The same problem occurs with the Ukrainian word for vegetables - incorrectly spelled with Cyrillic characters. Typos or poor fact checking?