"Memorial Museums – The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities" by Paul Williams (Oxford/New York: Berg: 2007), 226 pages.

   
Of all the academic books I've read in the area of dark tourism studies, this is the one I found the best – even though the term 'dark tourism' doesn't even feature in the title, and is only discussed more or less in passing (p141f). But the subject of memorial museums as such, and all the individual instances discussed in the book clearly fall within the realm of dark tourism, and several are prototypical sites even. These include the following: Perm 36, Tsitsernakaberd, Maison des Esclaves, the Chernobyl Museum in Kiev & Pripyat, Terrorhaza in Budapest, the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, Taipei 2-28 Memorial Museum, Robben Island, Oklahoma City National Memorial, Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Cambodia, various genocide memorials in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Ground Zero in New York (esp. the Tribute WTC).
  
The author makes the explicit and well-justified decision to concentrate only on "new" memorial museums, and in particular those not concerned with WWII or the Holocaust (of which there are many and which form a subject matter of their own much discussed elsewhere). The only near exception to the former is the inclusion of the Hiroshima Peace Museum (though arguably its focus is not so much the war but the atomic implications). One can also argue that some of the places mentioned aren't in actual fact museums at all (such as the cemetery at Srebrenica or the memorial at Atocha Station in Madrid, Spain, dedicated to the victims of the bombings on 11 March 2004). These can only count as memorial sites.
  
The book is not simply a string of case studies. Far from it. It is ordered topically along issues such as : authenticity of place and artefacts, the politics involved, victimhood and responsibility, the shaping of historic consciousness, etc. – and all the various concrete sites/museums come in wherever relevant. Thus the picture that emerges is less determined by the concrete sites' features as such but more by overarching criteria. This is a great advancement over e.g. works such as Lennon/Foley (2000), which was still much more case-study focused.
  
And in the delicate and much discussed area of determining dark tourists' motivations for visiting sites associated with death, atrocities and disaster, Williams provides the best-worded synopsis I have read to date:
  
"I posit that a key aspect of their [i.e. that of dark memorial museums, PH] appeal is in the way they offer a concrete instance for thinking about extreme conditions and moral choices that both defined the political twentieth century, and also speak to our human fascination with danger, mortality, and loss. That is, in the everyday lives of visitors who will probably never be asked to confront such life and death situations, historical atrocities allow us to experiment mentally with the furthest boundaries of what life can involve." (Williams 2007:142f)
  
Of course, this only applies to the really serious dark tourism-related memorial museums, and much less so to other sites, in particular ones that do not have the form of museums. In its concentration on (almost) exclusively museum sites lies a certain limitation of the book. Rather "raw", less commodified sites are hardly covered, and none of the so-called "lighter" dark tourism attractions either. Nor do those that have less to do with actually deadly disasters but rather with the mere potentiality, or fear, of disaster, such as various Cold War sites or volcanic sites such as Heimaey, find a place in the book. But that is simply due to the set scope of the book, and not a fault. In its chosen selection of museums it is pretty comprehensive, certainly more so than any other theoretical dark tourism studies book I know of.
  
As such it can also be an inspiration for the dark tourism practitioner! Moreover, all dark tourists who have ever been confronted with the typical journalistic "moral panic" accusations that going to such sites is nothing but rubbernecked voyeurism will find valuable ammunition for defending themselves. In that sense, then, this book is to be highly recommended to both "pure" theorists of dark tourism as well as its more thoughtful practitioners. The rest should perhaps rather pick Dom Joly's much more jocular and entertaining "The Dark Tourist".
 

  

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