By both overestimating its depth and underestimating its scope, this book's title does not do justice to its contents: this is not actually a cultural history of the Alps. Rather, it is an entertaining collection of anecdotes about alpine towns, people, vistas, celebrations, and legends—and the many visitors, both anonymous and prominent, that have been drawn to them. In four parts, labeled Landscape, History, Imagination, and Visitors, the author chronicles the well-known transformation of the Alps from terrifying geological obstacle to picturesque playground of the British (and continental European, but mostly British) middle and upper classes. Liberated from the fetters of scholarly apparatus that mandate source attribution and rigorous demonstrations of causality, the author is free to inform readers that the legend of William Tell, even if just a legend, signifies the Habsburgs' “biggest defeat” (p. 53)—the loss of Switzerland. That the Habsburgs prospered quite successfully without Switzerland for half a millenium is beside the point—one cannot escape the impression that this claim, like many others, emerges from the author's talent for storytelling, not his conviction.

The impressive range of topics treated hints at the incredible wealth of studies that could be written about alpine central Europe beyond the well-trodden paths of Romanticism, John Ruskin, and the Alpine Club. The author's descriptions of pilgrimage sites, including monasteries and tombs erected before the fall of the Roman empire, the great monasteries of Einsiedeln and the Couvent de la Grande Chartreuse, the civil wars brought about by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the 1803 discovery of the texts that would later serve as the lyrics for Orff's Carmina Burana together create a patchwork of alpine religiosity that suggests the metaphoric possibilities of the sublime. The author alludes to environmental change when recounting the tremendous effect of human ingenuity on the alpine landscape, its glaciers, flora, fauna, and even human settlements. The dam on the Durance, built in the 1950s to harness hydroelectric power, created the second-largest artificial lake in Europe, the Lac de Serre-Ponçon, and at the same time engulfed the village of Savines (the author notes that Savines-le-Lac “remains consigned beneath the waters to this day” [p. 99]—but it is actually Savines that is no more: Savines-le-Lac is the name of its successor village, located on the shores of, rather than beneath, the lake). The construction of alpine railways, and later alpine tunnels, dramatically reduced travel times—but while today's visitor will find alpine train travel “alluring and exotic” (p. 176), the president of the Alpine Club complained that “the Alps were being ‘disfigured with unnecessary railways, their cliffs degraded with iron lifts’” (p. 178).

This book deserves to be commended on many accounts. First and foremost, it is pleasant to read. Although Switzerland gets the lion's share of his attention, the author does note how expansive the Alps actually are, and occasionally includes references to the much neglected Slovenian portion of the Julian Alps. Dramatic leaps from antiquity to the post-war era are made deftly and smoothly, lending admirable chronological breadth. The author makes ample use of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century guidebooks (primarily British) to recreate contemporary experiences of the Alps. He combines information about seasonal celebrations of interest to readers planning their own alpine excursions, the traditional purview of guidebooks, with critical commentary regarding local political history, which is most commonly left out of guidebooks (although some of these observations, such as “Bad Tölz has always been very Bavarian: in the 1930s the Nazis established an elite military training college for SS cadets here” [p. 185], might just has well been left out of this book as well).

Nevertheless, the book can be frustrating and disappointing in equal measure. The bibliography is scant, and readers trying to find original sources for anecdotes or statements of particular interest are unlikely to succeed. The photographs are accompanied by neither captions nor credits. Perhaps these omissions can be justified by the book's apparent target audience: tourists rather than historians. That is not, however, an excuse for recurrent exaggeration (or error) in the interest of dynamic prose. It is perhaps witty, but simply untrue, for example, that the “real rulers [of pre-revolutionary France] … had all eventually come to a bloody end at the hands of the operators of Madame Guillotine” (p. 106). Is Hitler's “Eagle's Nest” retreat really “one of his most notorious legacies” (p. 148)? The author's proffered explanation of the popularity of right-wing parties in Carinthia and the vicinity of Lucerne, “the attachment of far-right ideology to high places,” rings as hollow as his claim that “Bavaria was always the homeland of Nazism. Munich was the early focal point of the movement but the mountains were its spiritual heart” (p. 155). After devoting several pages to describing how overrun with tourists Chamonix had become by the late nineteenth century, it seems unwarranted to describe “the little town beneath Mont Blanc” later as an “obscure climbing centre” (p. 200) before it became the site of the 1924 Winter Olympics.

Nor is this most transnational of regions used to escape from the strictures of nation-state-oriented history. The author tells us that “the history of the Alps consists, for the most part, of constant fighting between the different ethnic, linguistic, religious, and national groups that have occupied the mountains over the millenia” (p. 23). But what of the commonalities of alpine existence across political and even geographic barriers, such as the problems posed by poverty or iodine deficiency (and hence goiter)? Or transhumence and other common solutions to the challenges of agriculture in such inhospitable environments? The author mentions, among many common alpine industries, bee-keeping, cheese-making, and industries based on lumber, mineral production, and hydroelectric power—but does not explore how these may have constituted a shared alpine culture.

Instead, the author's understanding of culture seems to focus on the famous and the rich—from Ludwig II, whose “story is worth telling” because he was “one of the most bizarre figures to be associated with the Alps” (p. 104), and the Trapp Family Singers, through literati such as Byron, Wordsworth, and Percy and Mary Shelley, to “gliterrati” such as Prince Charles. From the perspective of the “skiing duchesses, skating lords, and curling bishops” (p. 199) who flocked to the Alps in the early twentieth century, “early resorts were still in effect small villages with no discernable cultural life to offer visitors” (p. 201). But that need not prevent the historian from an interest in village-based cultural practices. A different sort of cultural history of the Alps could focus on the experiences of its native residents—those alpine villagers and the seasonal, migrant laborers who join them, who, according to geologist James Forbes, “live on friendly terms with their dumb herds, so accustomed to privation as to dream of no luxury, and utterly careless of the fate of empires, or the change of dynasties” (p. 96).