Customer Reviews

Atlas of North America

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having previously purchased the Oxford Atlas of the World I was expecting a similar volume devoted to NA and it's largest singular component, the United States. What I got was a beautifully produced book authored by people who clearly view the United States as a foreign country. Don't get me wrong, the maps are exquisitely rendered and the statistical tables and graphs are accurate as far as I can tell, but it was curiously lacking in certain key components and made some odd choices of emphasis. As an example, the atlas is devoid of the typical "mileage between cities" chart, a useful addendum commonly included with atlases. Additionally, at least in the case of California, the authors made some odd choices that I can only assume are mistakes. For example, in the "state bio" section there is a brief summary of each state and a smaller bio of the states' capital accompanied with a small map and one or two pictures. In California's case the picture next to Sacramento is that of San Diego's downtown waterfront.

The atlas completely short shrifts the U.S. capital. There is only one index reference to Washington D.C. and that's a single page map showing Maryland, Delaware and The District of Columbia lumped together. In the "state/capital bio" section they combine Washington with Maryland and don't provide any more information on D.C. than they do on Annapolis. Finally, there is a city street map section later in the book where the nation's capital shares space on one page with Tampa and St. Petersburg. To compare Washington D.C. with all the nation's memorials, the Smithsonian complex, the houses of Congress, the White House and the nearby Civil War battlefields with Florida's medium size twin cities doesn't show much respect nor does it provide any differentiation between a national capital and ordinary cities; especially when you consider that all of the Canadian provincial capitals and Mexico City received significantly more coverage.

I rated this at 4 stars and briefly considered 3. It is a beautiful book, and every atlas does have flaws of one type of another, but I can't get past the belief that this was badly edited either by design or neglect.

9/6/11

Amazon's pricing is all over the map on this and they're now trying to sell it for $125 at the time of this writing... ridiculous. I paid less than $40 within the past year. Don't reward this seller for bad behavior.

Such books are readily found in libraries; however, if you want a handy reference book on knowledge of North America at your desk, this is highly recommended. The first section of the book contains many charts and tabulations for demographics, surface features, hydrographics, and geospatial data. The remaining bulk of the book consists of state maps.