This is exactly what it says on the tin: a collection of the most popular photographs posted on National Geographic's Instagram account. Unsurprisingly, they're all very good photos: vivid images of a wide variety of people, places, animals, and other things from all around the world. The book is cleverly put together, too, with photos on facing pages often reflecting or echoing each other in surprising and interesting ways.

Most of the images have only single line captions, but a number of them -- including some vintage photos dating back as far as 1907 -- have a brief paragraph of explanation included. A few instead include a handful of the comments people left on them on Instagram, which didn't seem to me to add very much, but for all I know maybe that's just because they needed an extra page of text on those to make the layout work.

Anyway, it was nice to spend an hour or so appreciating all of these very cool pictures, and perhaps even nicer, in this time of nervous isolation, to escape with a bit of armchair travel. I'm glad Nat Geo felt moved to provide these in book form for those of us who don't much bother with Instagram. ( )