The idea of choosing the Wonders of the World can be traced all the way back to the 5th century, B.C., when the Greek historian Herodotus of the Halicarnassus listed seven must-sees, the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt and six other constructions that long ago vanished from the earth.
In this deluxe new LIFE book, Wonders of the World, the editors return to the sites of the original Seven Wonders and then keep right on traveling around the globe - eventually visiting in words and pictures seven-times-seven Wonders, plus one more.
There are old Wonders here and a new list offered by the New7Wonders Foundation, a Switzerland-based organization that conducted an online poll that saw more than a million votes cast for the world's greatest Wonders. There are man-made Wonders and natural Wonders. There are obscure Wonders and famous Wonders.
The amazing stories behind your favorites are recounted as LIFE goes to the Colosseum, to Stonehenge, to the Great Wall, to Machu Picchu, to the Taj Mahal, to Easter Island, to The Acropolis and the Vatican and back to the Great Pyramid. We travel into outer space for a close-up look at the International Space Station, and into the sea for a sensational vantage on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. We go to the summit of Mount Everest and down into the mile-deep Grand Canyon in Arizona. We could not choose between the world's tallest waterfall, 3,212-foot-high Angel Falls in Venezuela, or that which is arguably the world's most awesome, Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border - so we went with both.
Fifty Wonders in all, each more wondrous than the last. A reader cannot help being amazed and inspired by what man's industry has built through time, and what sublime Wonders nature has graced us with.
This is a book Herodotus would have loved! And then comes the big bonus: The 7 LIFE Wonders.
We were sure that some of these fabulous sites were suitable for framing, and so we went to the vast LIFE archives and picked pictures of some of the most wonderful Wonders taken by famous LIFE photographers. Using a technique we developed in our 2009 book The Classic Collection, we inserted prints of these places in the last section of our book.
Better yet: When you remove the prints to frame them, the image stays on the page, so your lovely coffee-table book remains intact. For these wonders, a wondrous book.
Click to Enlarge
