Denis Wood has created an atlas unlike any other. From mapping radio waves permeating the air to Halloween pumpkins on porches, Wood's joyful subversion of the traditional notions of mapmaking forge new ways of seeing not only the particular, but also the very nature of place itself. Surveying his century-old, half-square mile neighborhood Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina, Wood searches for the revelatory details in what has never been mapped or may not even be mappable. In each map, he attunes the eye to the invisible, the overlooked, and the seemingly insignificant. Together, these maps accumulate into a multi-layered story about one neighborhood as well as about the pursuit of understanding the places we call home. This alchemical combination of science and art creates a fascinating tension between the empirical and the elusive, between what one can know and what one can imagine. As much as Everything Sings is a collection of extraordinary maps, it is also a testament to the imaginative capacity of humans to make them.
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That a cartographer could set out on a mission that's so emotional, so personal, so idiosyncratic, was news to me. --Ira Glass, from his introduction to Everything Sings
Everything Sings is an atlas that is not an atlas: it is a series of stories that, along with Denis Wood s illuminating text, read like a compelling work of fiction. Welcome to the mysterious, mundane, unique, and commonplace world of Boylan Heights, a location fortunate enough to be flattered with the kind of inventive and groundbreaking mapping Wood offers here. --Katherine Harmon, editor of You Are Here: Personal Geographies & Other Maps of the Imagination
Everything Sings is an atlas that is not an atlas: it is a series of stories that, along with Denis Wood s illuminating text, read like a compelling work of fiction. Welcome to the mysterious, mundane, unique, and commonplace world of Boylan Heights, a location fortunate enough to be flattered with the kind of inventive and groundbreaking mapping Wood offers here. --Katherine Harmon, editor of You Are Here: Personal Geographies & Other Maps of the Imagination
About the Author
The author of the popular and highly influential The Power of Maps, Wood has been a key figure in disseminating the idea that all maps reflect a certain and powerful subjectivity rather than represent an objective reality. The Power of Mapsbegan as Wood's curatorial vision for an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in 1992 and became a book in the same year (the exhibition was remounted the following year at the Smithsonian). Wood has written numerous books that critique, investigate, and, ultimately, reorient his readers not only to the micro-spatial our neighborhoods, homes, and bodies but also to our own very human instinct to understand where we live through making maps. These books include The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World (University of Chicago, 2009) co-authored with John Fels, Rethinking the Power of Maps (Guilford, 2010) with Fels and John Krygier, Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land (Guilford, 2003), and Home Rules (John Hopkins University Press, 1994).
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In the Introduction to this book, Wood asks us to consider what maps would be like if they were designed to convey the experience of place in order to celebrate and conserve it rather than serving as instruments for those who wish to remake and destroy it (suburb makers, freeway designers, etc). I'm not a cartographer or a demographer, so I can't comment with authority on how this book might affect the way those professionals re-think what they do (as Joni Seager's work has done, for example), but I am an English professor who teaches nature writing and environmental literature, and to me this book is a marvel. Wood, along with his students, has spent over 20 years mapping his neighborhood, Boylan Heights, and the many ingenious ways he's chosen to represent it illuminate life there in ways that are charming as well as eye-opening. The maps themselves work on you like the image, like works of art--the cover, for example, represents where in Wood's neighborhood you will find jack-o-lanterns on Halloween. Others of my favorite maps in the book are the view of the stars looking up through the treetops and the light pools of illumination from street lights--which is not the same at all as mapping the location of street lights with a small circle. Using this book as inspiration, I have asked my own students to create maps of our campus that would convey to a map-user/reader a way to experience and understand the natural aspects of our campus. Students produced such maps as those of edible plants on campus, places to sit (the official campus map contains only buildings and sidewalks), the progress of shadows from trees throughout the day. (I'm still waiting for someone to map the ghost trees on campus, that is, those that have blown or been cut down.) You will not look at either the world or maps in the same way after you read this book. I can't recommend it highly enough!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
"...this book is a single sheet of an epic novel yet to be written, mapping uncharted territories we have yet to discover for stories whose names we have yet still to learn." Andrew Berardini on "Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas"
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
I Sought this book out after hearing it described on This American Life. I am fascinated by the maps, and the window they offer on a community / Neighbourhood. I also really enjoyed the authors essay more than I expected to.
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