Tag Archives: Geography

In My Hands Today…

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Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will – Judith Schalansky, translated by Christine Lo

There are still places on earth that are unknown. Visually stunning and uniquely designed, this wondrous book captures fifty islands that are far away in every sense-from the mainland, from people, from airports, and from holiday brochures.

Author Judith Schalansky used historic events and scientific reports as a springboard for each island, providing information on its distance from the mainland, whether its inhabited, its features, and the stories that have shaped its lore.

With stunning full-colour maps and an air of mysterious adventure, Atlas of Remote Islands is perfect for the traveller or the romantic in all of us.

In My Hands Today…

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Brilliant Maps for Curious Minds: 100 New Ways to See the World – Ian Wright

Which countries don’t have rivers? Which ones have North Korean embassies? Who drives on the “wrong” side of the road? How many national economies are bigger than California’s? And where can you still find lions in the wild? You’ll learn answers to these questions and many more in Brilliant Maps for Curious Minds. This one-of-a-kind atlas is packed with eye-opening analysis (Which nations have had female leaders?), whimsical insight (Where can’t you find a McDonald’s?), and surprising connections that illuminate the contours of culture, history, and politics.

Each of these 100 maps will change the way you see the world—and your place in it.

In My Hands Today…

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Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks – Ken Jennings

In a world where geography only makes the headlines when college students are (endlessly) discovered to be bad at it, these hardy souls somehow thrive. Some crisscross the map working an endless geographic checklist: visiting all 3,143 U.S. counties, for example, or all 936 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Some pore over million-dollar collections of the rarest maps of the past; others embrace the future by hunting real-world cartographic treasures like “geocaches” or “degree confluences” with GPS device in hand. Some even draw thousands of their own imaginary maps, lovingly detailing worlds that never were.

Ken Jennings was a map nerd from a young age himself, you will not be surprised to learn, even sleeping with a bulky Hammond atlas at the side of his pillow, in lieu of the traditional Teddy bear. As he travels the nation meeting others of his tribe–map librarians, publishers, “roadgeeks,” pint-sized National Geographic Bee prodigies, the computer geniuses behind Google Maps and other geo-technologies–he comes to admire these geographic obsessives. Now that technology and geographic illiteracy are increasingly insulating us from the lay of the land around us, we are going to be needing these people more than ever. Mapheads are the ones who always know exactly where they are–and where everything else is as well.

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Histories of Nations: How Their Identities Were Forged – edited by Peter Furtado

Global histories tend to be written from the narrow viewpoint of a single author and a single perspective, with the inevitable bias that it entails. But in this thought-provoking collection, twenty-eight writers and scholars give engaging, often passionate accounts of their own nation’s history.

The countries have been selected to represent every continent and every type of state: large and small; mature democracies and religious autocracies; states that have existed for thousands of years; and those born as recently as the twentieth century. Together, they contain two-thirds of the world’s population.

In the United States, for example, the myth of the nation’s “historylessness” remains strong, but in China, history is seen to play a crucial role in legitimising three thousand years of imperial authority.

“History wars” over the content of textbooks rage in countries as diverse as Australia, Russia, and Japan. Some countries, such as Iran or Egypt, are blessed—or cursed—with a glorious ancient history that the present cannot equal; others, such as Germany, must find ways of approaching and reconciling the pain of the recent past.

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The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology – Simon Winchester

William Smith was not rich or well connected, but his passion for rocks and fossils, and his twenty-year obsession with single-handedly mapping the geology of Britain made him one of the most significant men of the nineteenth century.

However his vision cost him dear – his wife went mad, his work was stolen by jealous colleagues who eventually ruined him, and he was imprisoned for debt.

Simon Winchester tells the fascinating story of ‘Strata’ Smith, a man who crossed boundaries of class, wealth and science to produce a map that fundamentally changed the way we view the world.