Customer Reviews

Atlas of Remote Islands

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

That impossible-to-please friend, that cranky relative, that coffee table begging for something more interesting than last Sunday's New York Times Magazine --- worry about them no more.

Here is your holiday gift, your birthday present, your living room's conversation-igniter.

And no worries that "Atlas of Remote Islands (Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will)" will be showing up on legions of gift lists. [To buy "Atlas of Remote Islands" from Amazon, click here.] Though published by Penguin, the biggest recognition the book has received to date is the German Book Office's October Book of the Month. The author, Judith Schalansky, is a German designer and novelist whose last book was "Fraktur Mon Amour, a study of the Nazis' favorite typeface.

Schalansky got interested in maps and atlases for the most personal of reasons. She was born in East Berlin; when she was 10, East and West Germany merged, "and the country I was born in disappeared from the map." With that, she lost interest in political maps and became fascinated with the basic building blocks of Earth's land masses : physical topography.

Fascinating stuff.

You doubt me?

Consider: Schalansky sees a finger traveling across a map as "an erotic gesture."

Consider: Schalansky disdains any island you can easily get to. The more remote the destination, the more enthusiastic she is for it. Like Peter I Island in the Antarctic --- until the late 1990s, fewer people had visited it than had set foot on the moon.

Consider: Schalansky believes "the most terrible events have the greatest potential to tell a story" --- and "islands make the perfect setting for them." Thus, the line at the start of the book: "Paradise is an island. So is hell."

The result? Fifty islands. The world's loneliest places, in lovely two-page spreads, with geographical information and curious histories on the left, and, on the right, a map of the hapless land mass set on a deceptively peaceful blue background.

Start in the Far North, at Lonely Island, where the average annual temperature is -16 degrees. In the Indian Ocean, on Diego Garcia, is a secretive British military base with a golf course where 500 families once lived. A hundred twenty million crabs begin life on Christmas Island; millions of penguins inhabit Macquarie Island. France tested its hydrogen bomb on Fangataufa, after which no one was allowed to set foot on it for six years. On Pukapuka, there is no word for "virgin." The Banabas hang their dead from their huts until the flesh disappears; they store the bones under their houses.

And, to give you a sense of Schalansky's lovely, ironic style as a writer:

St. Kilda, United Kingdom
There are sixteen cottages, three houses and one church in the only village on St. Kilda. The island's future is written in its graveyard. Its children are all born in good health, but most stop feeding during their fourth, fifth or sixth night. On the seventh day, their palates tighten and their throats constrict, so it becomes impossible to get them to swallow anything. Their muscles twitch and their jaws hang loose. Their eyes grow staring and they yawn a great deal; their mouth stretch in mocking grimaces. Between the seventh and ninth day, two-thirds of the newborn babies die, boys outnumbering girls. Some die sooner, some later: one dies on the fourth day, another not till the twenty-first.

Amsterdam Island, France
Everyone who stays on Amsterdam for longer than a year is examined by a medical officer from the south of France to check that he is coping with the long period of restriction of movement and the confined, purely masculine environment. No woman has visited longer than two days. At night, the men gather in the small video room in Great Skua to watch one of the porn films from their personal collection. Each man sits in a row on his own. The loudspeakers emit grunts and groans, and the air is heavy with the musky scent of the bull seals.

Are these stories true? The author is cagey:

That's why the question whether these stories are `true' is misleading. Every detail stems from factual sources...however I was the discoverer of the sources, researching them through ancient and rare books, and I have transformed the texts and appropriated them as sailors appropriate the lands they discover.

Transformed? Well, why not --- it's not like you're booking a ticket to visit any of these places. Just the opposite. Reading in your favorite chair, sipping a cuppa, you can conclude there's no place like home.

As a book lover you can become forlorn with the constant barrage of why physical books and the brick-and-mortar bookstore are obsolete in these days of digital book hype and the pursuit of immediate gratification in quick, small portions.

"Atlas of Remote Islands" is the refutation of those perceived realities.

I serendipitously came across this book as I was meandering through a bookstore...was arrested by the book displayed (tall, thin) and the sub title ("Fifty Island I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will"). Okay, okay, I'm posting this review on Amazon... but the book is so good that if your local bookstore doesn't have it, then buy it wherever you can!

Not only is the concept for the book just so cool.... it is also beautifully presented, each entry wonderfully laid out and completely engrossing. This is a book you curl up with in your favorite chair on a dark winter night with a hot cup of something in arms reach.

This book is exactly why the book - the physically opening the cover and turning the pages book - will never become obsolete.

This is a book you have to hold in your hand, page through, and imagine about. Then you put it on the shelf. Then you take it down and look at it again. Repeat.

Really, it's very beautiful, very inspiring, very mysterious.

I loved this book!

This was right up my alley. I've always like exiting and remote places. This book was a great sample of some very interesting places. Just a little taste, if you will, that can entice more research into all of these interesting islands.

A word of caution, don't get this book if you're expecting in depth information or even photos of these places. Each island has a sort of antidotal write up or story about it and a map like illustration of the island.

P.S. This book is perfect for "bathroom reading"!

Ms. Schalansky's book on remote islands is pleasing work on lands that are located in remote places of the earth and some that, while located close to more populated islands, have some interesting stories behind them. The book consists of a short essay summarizing the book and descriptions of the islands broken down by location (Arctic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, etc.), a glossary of terms and a short index.

The stories that interested me the most were the histories of Diego Garcia (the natives being removed for the purpose of constructing a military base), Pingelap (where inbreeding of the natives led to a high incidence of color blindness), Tikopia (where infanticide was (is?) condoned to control population growth and preserve scarce resources and Takuu (missionaries and researchers are not allowed on the island). Atlasova Island's story interested me as well for its description of a perfectly symmetrical volcano rising up out the sea just off Russia's Kamchatka peninsula.

Some of the stories however were just descriptions of barren rocks such as those in the Arctic Ocean and the islands close to Antarctica which left me to want to learn more history about these places. I think the book could have included a bibliography which could have directed the reader to more in depth coverage that would given some flavor to some of the interesting stories found in this book. A nice work that should find itself in a cartographer's book collection.

Most readers have not (though I have) acquired J.K. Rowling's extra little side book to the Harry Potter series, a paperback guide to fairies and other weird creatures, in which the author pretends to describe, briefly but without omitting any important weirdness, all manner of sprites, pixies, and things she plain invented herself, as if it were a Scouting manual.
What if there were also a book about faraway, obscure, tiny, isolated places in the world that are REAL? And there are weird, amazing facts (? stories, anyway!) about each of them - and some of them are true and the rest are, at least, sort of true?! Wouldn't THAT be fun?
Here it is! I think the remarkable thing about this book (which is SO remarkable that it challenges my powers of explanation) is that it illuminates the "twin mysteries of existence and perception" by putting into the reader's mind images and feelings about a place s/he's never been, but *could really go* if s/he had enough money and a very fancy boat and a lot of provisions (as did the explorers who found them). You can just feel your mind stretching itself around the globe toward these tiny chunks of rock, sand, and coconut palm - and you can just feel it recoiling and drawing back from all the volcanoes, crabs, ants, cliffs, ice, and other flaws in these non-paradises.
An island is an analogy for an individual life, and for the reality that we only perceive what is within the range of our senses, and only for as long as we live -- and for the fact that the earth itself is an oasis and safe haven in endless space. The rest is open ocean, deep and unknowable. No wonder we all love islands!
If nobody lives on a tiny island, does a tree falling on it make a sound?
Get this book.

This is an amazing, somewhat eerie, but certainly interesting expose about remote islands all over the world. A great aphrodisiac for people like me who are curious and filled with wanderlust...I loved it but wish the maps were more detailed!

This slim volume represents (for me) vicarious travel at its best. Each double-facing page features an island complete with topographical map, location relative to other land masses and assorted skeletal historical facts. Best of all in my opinion however are the short 1-page accompanying texts featuring aspects of each island's geographical features and highlighting a particular episode or event in the island's past. It is this that brings each island to life - uniquely and indelibly. A perfect enticement to day-dreaming of faraway time-out-of-time lands, and perhaps also a more pictorial and succinct companion volume to Simon Winchester's Outposts although the latter takes on more of a travelogue narrative.

A fascinating compendium of 50 remote islands far from the mainland, from people, from airports and from the public eye. Schalansky gives each of these little treasures individual attention on a single page with an accompanying map. The result is a cross between a history lesson and a short story, full of spare poetry and fascinating historical details.

Some of the islands from Pitcairn Island (the place the Mutiny on the Bounty settlers chose to inhabit) to Easter Island are familiar, others, like Russia's Lonely Island or Mexico's Socorro Island are less known but no less worthy of exploration.

Schalansky's opening chapter is titled "Paradise Is An Island, So Is Hell" and the islands that the book covers range from tropical atolls to frozen, rocky spits of land. The author is a writer and designer who lives in Berlin and lectures on the fundamentals of typography. She not only wrote the text but designed and typeset the book, an act perhaps as solitary as a life lived on a remote island. This is a quiet, spare and lovely work.

I was roaming around a map store when I found this plain looking and odd-sized book. I started leafing through the pages and immediately noticed how beautifully written it was. The author has a scientifically poetic way of describing these strange islands, drawing me in to their worlds and leaving little remote island-shaped impressions in my mind. Later, someone pointed out that it looked like the dust jacket was missing and I explained there was never one there in the first place. I like this aesthetic, it feels like something's missing. A reviewer mentioned that the maps could be a little better but - maybe they just leave more to the imagination. It was love at first sight for me with this atlas.