Customer Reviews

Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World

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This book is published by a small publishing house in Massachusetts, and the production shows. The cover on the book I received looks more like the earlier edition (not like the one shown here), though it contains maps of the 2004 US presidential election. The format is 'landscape' (pages wider than they are long, though page size is still only letter/A4), like the older edition. I got it yesterday, and browsed it after dinner.

The writing style is conversational, rather than academic, and is peppered with rhetorical questions. The authors appear as characters in the opening chapter, presumably to ground the thesis of the book: that maps represent not a picture of an objective reality, but a personal point of view. So it's not an academic book, really. It might be used by high-school seniors, or perhaps college freshmen, in an introductory class. It's designed to encourage its readers to ask questions about the maps they use in life. Just as history is written by the victor, so maps are drawn by the conqueror.

My only real disappoinment with the book is the production, rather than the content: the cover is brightly illustrated in colour, but the book itself is entirely black and white. Buckminster Fuller's triangular-grid 'projection' of a photograph of the earth's surface is striking in color, but loses most of its impact without color. The same can be said for the 'planting guide' map of the US - seven shades of grey fail to make the same impact as the seven colours of the rainbow. There are reproductions of old maps which just don't do them justice at this scale: many of the maps seem reproduced from old worn plates. Perhaps that's inevitable for historical maps, but it's a shame. The overall design of the book is also disappointing: the fonts used (kind of random mixture of serif/sans-serif, dissonant sizes for headings and text), the amounts of whitespace (not much), and the greyed-out sidebar boxes - they all combine to give it that 1991-desktop-published-from-a-Mac look, which I found a little strange for a book that's all about the importance of representation.

A loosely tied compilation of items - essentially a series of presentation stapled together. No color. Interesting stuff that was not professionaly published.