The Queen Mary 2 is saluted by the HMB Endeavour, the replica of Captain James Cook's ship, on March 4, 2012 off the coast of Victoria, Australia. (Photo by James Morgan/Carnival Australia via Getty Images)

A man sits in the back of a taxi with a goat after purchasing it from a livestock market ahead of the Eid al-Adha festival in Kolkata, India, September 8, 2016. (Photo by Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters)

An indigenous woman participates in a parade called "International Indigenous Beauty" during the first World Games for Indigenous Peoples in Palmas, Brazil, October 24, 2015. Billed as the indigenous Olympics, the games are expected to attract nearly 2,000 athletes from dozens of Brazilian ethnicities, as well as from such far-flung nations as Ethiopia and New Zealand. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

Victor Peralta from Uruguay gestures during the fourth International Tattoo Convention in Quito, September 25, 2016. (Photo by Kevin Granja/Reuters)

In this photograph taken on April 1, 2015, an Indonesian resident and child walk away from an abandoned school building as Mount Sinabung erupts in Karo district on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. According to authorities about 3,500 people were displaced after the February 2014 eruption of Mount Sinabung volcano and many are still living in evacuation centers as the volcano remains active. (Photo by Sutanta Aditya/AFP Photo)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

How sure are you of your geographical knowledge? Buzzfeed recently put Americans’ geographical knowledge to the test with a survey in which participants had to write in countries’ names on a blank European political map. Unfortunately, they didn’t fare too well, but some of their responses are hilarious (or hilariously mis-informed). But don’t be so quick to judge Americans – when Buzzfeed posted a similar survey testing Brits’ knowledge of the 50 United States, they also came up short. On the one hand, knowing a country’s states is different from knowing independent countries, but on the other, some U.S. states are larger than some European nations, and some U.S. states have larger economies than some European nations.