Customer Reviews

The Power of Maps

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

 

 

Ranging from strident politics to Eco-like semiotics, this book considers the map in all its forms, intents and uses. The text is a little too preachy for much of the book, but the quality of some of the ideas and the enthusiam with which Wood presents them makes this bearable. Wood's basic point is that maps are human constructs that come with points of view. As such, questions about the qualities of a map can't be answered without also asking what the map was constructed for. With examples ranging from the Peters Projection controversies, to election gerrymandering, to natural resource utilization, he shows how all maps are designed to both include and to exclude, and how they embody a representation of the world in the best tradition of Eco's "signs". A great book, slightly marred by the writing style.

If you want to know what you can do with maps and what their creators are able to do with them, read this. It's an important book for anyone interested in the history of maps or in the ways we make political and social decisions on the basis of mapped information today. Yes, Wood does build a complex analytical structure for deciphering maps, but they are intricate objects and dense with information. This is an excellent source for anyone with a serious interest in the subject.

If you want the history of cartography or an explanation of its technicalities, this is not the book for you. If you want to see more clearly the human landscape in which maps are embedded and the human activities for which maps are constructed, this IS the book for you! Brilliant and fun and informative reading for cartographers and laymen. Denis Wood shows how maps represent societies as much as topographies. Grab your topo for rafting trip through time and place!

I read Wood's The Power of Maps a few years ago, and I've just come back to it. It is not light reading (although it's well written and a pleasure to read), and it isn't just about cartography. It is about the ways in which we use symbols to reflect our world's biases, power structures, hopes, fears and more. Maps are forms of cultural language, and Wood does not shrink from pulling the curtain away from the fact that they are also often arbitrary, manipulative, and simply wrong. At the same time, he celebrates them, and he encourages readers to come to maps with their critical antennae raised. So, maps can tell us much more about our world than most people realize. This is real scholarship, and it is intellectually rigorous, but it is also accessible, relevant and rich in content. It's a wonderful book.

This is a truly powerful and tremendously insightful discourse on the often "unseen" political uses to which maps can be put. It offers a rich and persuasively argued theoretical framework which goes well beyond its examples in its potential usefulness. Chapter Five "The Interest Lies in Signs and Myths" in particular is a tremendously thought-provoking and insightful analysis of maps and their legends and symbols as signs, signifiers and what they sometimes subconsciously signify to the consumer. A brilliant theoretical emendation of Roland Barthes' exposition of signs (Barthes' 1972 Mythologies). If you are willing to think along with the author this books may fundamentally change your perspective on a wide range of topics including nationalism, science and inter-state crises and conflicts over territory.

This is one of those books that come around all too infrequently that make us see the world differently. Those content with a limited view may not fully appreciate the depth of this book's insights. The prose simply soars beyond what one would expect from an academic subject...which makes it thrilling to read. Denis Wood's are not for the lazy or the closed-minded. They are, indeed, masterful.

My reactions on TRYING to read this book went from confused to disappointed to very annoyed. This book was my sole reading material on a camping trip, and if it hadn't been a gift from a friend, I would have used it, page by page, to add heat to the campfire. "The Power of Maps" consists of phony intellectual rambling, the point of which seems to be that powerful people use maps to their benefit. The exact point (or points?), however, is difficult to determine because the book is so hard to read. The author takes extremely trivial, shallow observations and builds them up into what appears to be an erudite scholarly work. In fact, it is pseudo-intellectual writing, composed of convoluted sentences, extremely obscure words, and citations which include Life magazine, the North Carolina Highway Map, and "The Little Engine That Could". For instance, the basis for one lengthy passage is the observation that the NC Highway Map does not note in the legend that blue denotes water! In the course of this rambling text, the author verbally attacks cartographers as somehow responsible for a number of ills in society.

Now that I have gotten over my disappointment in having no worthwhile reading material for my vacation and my annoyance at this book's shallow treatment of a subject I dearly love, my feelings have returned to confusion. I am confused as to why someone would take the trouble to write this book, and why someone else would think it is worthwhile to publish it.

I bought Wood's more recent book on maps (Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World) through amazon, and was somewhat disappointed (see my review there). So, this time around, I decided to get this book from my public library (yay for public libraries!). Boy am I glad I did! (Because I would have kicked myself if I had paid money for this one.) It appears that this book was later condensed to provide much of the material for "Seeing Through Maps...".

I can agree with most of what other reviewers have said about this book: The Ferris-Bueller moments (what an apt description!) caused by excessive use of ellipsis, the use of drawings by a three-year-old (literally) on many pages, the post-modernist over-intellectualized ramblings that tend to detract from what are perfectly valid and interesting points: the people in power really *do* draw the maps, and maps *do* give some people power (and take it away from others) by manipulating our conception of the world.

It's too bad that someone didn't reign the author in, in both of those books. He's really his own worst enemy. The writing is rambling and repetitive: you find yourself muttering "OK! OK! I *get* it! Can we move ON please!". With apologies to Blaise Pascal, it seems if the author had had more time, he could have written a shorter book.

I think it's really a shame that both books lack even a single colour plate, since maps possess beauty in addition to power, but perhaps it was appropriate to de-emphasize the beauty and focus on the power for the purposes of this book. Prospective readers should know that the "power" referred to in the title is of an ethereal, intellectual kind, that is perceived in the mind, not in the eyes.

For those who simply like maps, here is a quick response to "The Power of Maps": DO NOT bother reading this book! The writing is poor. The book is riddled with errors (the chapter on Tom Van Sant's beautiful, global satellite image map is particularly bad in this regard). Very few actual maps are included, and they are reprinted in an ugly, unreadable small black & white format. Worst of all, the author doesn't really have anything to say about the power OR beauty of maps, or about what makes a map elegant, eloquent, or useful.

Like so many ivory-tower deconstructionists, Wood's primary focus seems to be on the manipulation of language as a weapon against his own subject - in this case, cartography. As one who loves maps, and works with them professionally, I wouldn't have thought it would be possible to write about them in such an insipid, uninteresting, and unenlightening way. Don't waste your time or your money on this book!

A rambling discourse on maps, including things which are not maps, like "mental maps". After the first chapter, I skimmed around looking at topics I was interested in. Some impressions: On the History of Mapmaking: Apparently the author's son Chandler played a much bigger role than Erosthenes. On Cartographers: Since it is mathematically impossible to map the spherical world onto a flat peice of paper with complete isometric precision, the science of Cartography has little more claim to our respect than little Chandler's drawings. On the illustrations: Unfortunately for me, the only "beautifully illustrated" thing in the paperback edition is the cover.