Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers. By Becky Cooper; On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes. By Alexandra, Horowitz

MAPPING MANHATTAN: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers. By BECKY COOPER. 120 pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., index. New York: Abrams Image, 2013. $19.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781419706721. ON LOOKING: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes. By Alexandra, Horowitz. X and 310 pp.; ills., index. New York: Scribner, 2013. $27.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781439191255; $12.99 (ebook), ISBN 9781439191279. Geographers' place-focus grounds us in the wheres, whys, and hows of people's lives. It gives the field the advantages and disadvantages of drawing on people's curiosity about their own experiences and of sharing with many outside the field a sense of expertise. I jumped at the opportunity to review Mapping Manhattan and On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by nongeographers. I've got the curiosity based on a lifetime of experience living, working, and walking around the city. The books came and they are indeed attractive; Mapping Manhattan is especially so visually. Both are concept books, nicely executed, and I can recommend them. I'm not alone in doing so. Last time I checked, Mapping Manhattan had twenty reader reviews on Amazon, eighteen of which are five stars. On Looking gets a little less of a rave--nineteen reviews almost equally divided between fours and fives--but still enthusiastic. Both seem to be reaching the wider public geographers often miss. They bring sight and sound to the field, but still leave to geographers the clear integrative analyses needed. Both books involve walking, talking, and seeing--that's their basic plan. Becky Cooper, a recent Harvard comparative-literature graduate, spent a day walking from one end of Manhattan's Broadway to the other, spanning the entire borough north to south. As she walked, she and a friend handed out maps of the borough, simple but attractive outlines with Central Park in the middle (more or less), Broadway's vertical/diagonal slash, a short east-west line at Canal Street, and a little blob to the east that represents Roosevelt Island. The two women approached people and asked them to fill in the maps however they wished--make it your Manhattan, in other words--and return it. The book is a series of loosely grouped maps, arranged as they walked. Cooper opens with "Hearth and Home," Manhattan as a brick chimney with a tree and blackbirds nearby, and ends with her own corner as a New Yorker-ish cover. Many of the maps were filled in by the people she encountered during that one day. Others come from well-known contributors: actor Harvey Fierstein, writer Malcolm Gladwell, artist Yoko Ono, and aerialist Philippe Petit, for example. Each grouping begins with a page of commentary by Cooper and sketches by Bonnie Briant. Cooper describes herself as an "accidental cartographer" and the maps as "accidental autobiographies." In his foreword, New Yorker-writer Adam Gopnik, who has given us some interesting books on what it means to live in New York and Paris, describes them as "street haiku," the most abstract, parsimonious conveyer of place, the truest picture of Manhattan. Inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1974), Cooper's book reflects what he exposed: place as memory and desire. The maps reveal the human condition generally and thus could be of anywhere. Many respondents added little stars to the maps to indicate the same things people in Peoria would include--where I live, where I fell in love, where I fell out of love, my first kiss, maybe where I work, where my best friend lives, where I walk my dog. There is much less sense of route or distance. The character of the city strongly comes across in some works. The map titled "My Little Town Blues," with the word "struggle" dominating the scene, sits across from a map "Are Melting Away," dominated by a big bottle of Bayer aspirin, both pieces signal some of the character of the city: It can be a tough place. Manhattan has more than your average city's arts scene--consider the maps "Theater District" facing "Broadway's Golden Years"--so you get more concert and museum venues than you'd get in Peoria. …