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Product Details

From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on the Library of Congress's 4.8 million maps and 60,000 atlases, this is an overview of cartography in different times and cultures. Veteran picture editor Virga upends our notion of maps as two-dimensional representations of physical spaces by presenting depictions of imaginative or spiritual territory: a 17th-century map of the soul has five entry points, each corresponding to one of the five senses. And while we're accustomed to maps being oriented north, Islamic and some other cartographers oriented their maps south, as in an eye-opening 1996 Upside Down World Map made in Australia that shows the down under continent approximately where we usually see Greenland. Virga provides historical, sociological and anthropological background to each map. Captions for the plates are so small as to be almost unreadable, making it difficult to follow Virga's interpretations of the maps. Still, this is one of those rare coffee-table books that deserves to be read, that repeatedly delights the eye while informing the mind about the rich variety of humans' attempts to orient themselves in the world. 201 color illus. (Oct.)
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Review
"For anyone with a love of maps the book is a perfect treasure." -- David McCullough

About the Author
Vincent Virga is the author of EYES OF THE NATION: A VISUAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, which was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the History Book Club.

Customer Reviews

Splendid images, awful prose
I recently had the opportunity to peruse this book in a local library. I agree with all of the other reviewers that this book has astounding images, well-reproduced, and documenting a wide variety of maps in a multitude of different contexts. There are plenty of cartographic classics (the double sided ancient Chinese grid map, the "clover" Crusader map centered around Jerusalem) alongside some less well known maps (an Etruscan divining liver map--that's a stone replica of a liver with marks about how to divine things from it, a Japanese historical battle map showing the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate).

However, I must say that the accompanying text is really lacking. To be frank, it's downright repulsive. Stylistically, it's uninspiring at best. Furthermore, the text is filled with "explanations" about "what's really going on" that are totally unsubstantiated. Unfortunately, this book is hardly unique in that regard. It is symptomatic of our times to show "expertise" on this or that via simplistic reductive arguments that we've all grown too tired to challenge.

Two examples come to mind specifically. In the section on Japanese maps of Japan, he tries to argue that the ambiguity of the maps implies a mindset amongst the Japanese putting Japan as being "undefined in space" or something of that nature. Now that claim may very well be true, but he presents next to argument to support it other than images which appear just as ambiguous as other maps. There may be a way to deduce that conclusion from the maps but he doesn't show anything, he merely states.

More nauseating was the pat analysis of the Vietnam war. He reproduces a formerly classified US government map showing South Vietnam totally fragmented by VC presence and uses it to launch into a tired tirade about the follies of the US government blah blah blah. Once again, the conclusion may or may not be true but shiny pictures aren't really a substitute for critical analysis.

This book raises some very interesting questions about what and how much one can conclude about a society from the character of its maps. However, the shameless sophistry that follows makes it clear that the author has little regard for the complexity that such questions entail.

So if I was addressing a potential buyer/reader, I would say that the images in the book really are fabulous and the comments are at times enlightening. But if you're the kind of reader who doesn't appreciate pat conclusions that are pre-determined by some unspoken post-god-knows-what party line, brace yourself for a beautiful book but a stomach turning read.

no show
never received the book - was later informed it was sold by mistake and i received a refund.

Love maps and traveling thru time.
This book gives a unique glimpse at not only the history of cartography, but also the various purposes maps can serve. For maps lovers, like myself, the material is a window into other worlds of ancient knowledge thru beautiful illustrations and clear text.