Vanishing Asia

Across Asia, old traditions that are fast disappearing are recorded in Kevin Kelly's set of three oversize volumes, with 9,000 captioned images over 1,000 pages. Kelly travelled across dozens of Asian countries, going to the end of the road in remote places to photograph costume, architecture, festivals and ways of life, from Turkey to Japan and from Siberia to Indonesia. The first volume covers West Asia, the second Central Asia and the third East Asia, and each page has its own design. Many of the scenes shown no longer exist. Kelly, a co-founder of Wired magazine, worked on the project for almost five decades.

Tyler Cowen put it on his list of the best non-fiction books of 2022, noting that the three volumes are expensive and mostly photographs but worth it.