On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks
*Starred Review* Garfield follows up the best-seller Just My Type (2011) with an engrossing, endlessly fascinating history of maps. Following a foreword by popular-science writer Dava Sobel, he invites readers along on a trip through time and around the world that is enlightening and impossible to put down. The narrative dances from Marco Polo to Vinland, the first atlas (“the world in a book”), Lewis and Clark, the grids of Manhattan, and even the opening sequence of Casablanca. The people and places he has chosen to discuss are a collection of curiosities without peer, and even short “pocket map” visits with J. M. Barrie, the explorers Burke and Wills lost in Australia, and Winston Churchill’s WWII Map Room are diversions not to be missed. The length and breadth of his scholarship are staggering, while the witty tone makes for the most convivial of literary guides. There are dusty archives, library echoes, and abandoned destinations, but also the most contemporary of surveys with brisk considerations of Google Maps and the MRI. Popular history is an overused term these days, but Garfield rewrites the definition by issuing an irresistible invitation to see the world, and delivering on his promise of “the map as story, the map as life.” --Colleen Mondor