I couldn’t resist the subject. It was worth the read as he covers all of the subject areas that I liked and what I believe would interest most people. However, his presentation was often light and lacking in cohesion in critical areas.



How maps evolved and helped shape our view of the world is the biggest focus. We start with Ptolemy achieving an accurate estimate of the diameter for our spherical world and early influential maps and globes that at least put the Mediterranean world in place. The

I couldn’t resist the subject. It was worth the read as he covers all of the subject areas that I liked and what I believe would interest most people. However, his presentation was often light and lacking in cohesion in critical areas.



How maps evolved and helped shape our view of the world is the biggest focus. We start with Ptolemy achieving an accurate estimate of the diameter for our spherical world and early influential maps and globes that at least put the Mediterranean world in place. The loss of his perspective for about a millennium was a surprise, made up for with development of medieval maps filled with morality messages and pathways to Jerusalem. The stories of explorers such as Marco Polo allowed filling in maps with guesses (and mistakes) on geography of the Middle East and East. Eventually more of the perimeters of Africa could be added, and then the discovery of the New World accelerated interest in maps.



The history of the misnaming of America was new to me and interesting (Amerigo Vespucci apparently forged letters to support a claim of reaching Venezuela before Columbus, whose prior voyages had only hit the West Indies). The case of Cortes naming the Yucatan peninsula based on mistranslation of a Native’s response to his query with the Mayan phrase for “I don’t understand you.” Odd mistakes in mapping that got continued in subsequent maps, even for centuries, made for entertaining anecdotes (e.g. the “Mountains of Kong” in West Africa” and islands that didn’t exist). The excitement of blank spaces on maps fed the hunger of explorers, with Africa and finally Antarctica the last places to satisfy such a drive. For Lewis and Clarke’s foray across the Louisiana Purchase to the Pacific, the interest was extreme for the dreams of the United States.



The development of different projections for displaying flat maps of a round world was a major topic. The popularity of the Mercator projection has not diminished since 1569, despite the inaccurate portrayal of land masses in the northern hemisphere as relatively larger than in reality (e.g. Europe larger than South America rather than half its size). Such “cartographic imperialism” was corrected with the Peters cylindrical projection, but it was just too unaesthetic with its image of continents stretched downward like clothes on a line. Unfortunately, Garfield failed to explain clearly the bases of various projections or even to explain the issues of using flat maps for navigation. No reference is made to the so-called “great circle” distance as the shortest path between two points on a sphere (the line that inscribes the Earth’s diameter).



Other topics are more relevant to our current dependence on maps: the development of atlases, maps of cities for tourists (from Baedeker to Michelin guides) , the mash-up of geography with demographic or epidemiology data (e.g. a cholera map of London in 1849 pointing a finger at certain water supplies), the allure of treasure maps, and the development of fantasy maps (from the canals of Mars to Neverland and Middle Earth), and the functional artistry of city subway maps. The use of maps to visualize a plan takes form with examples of the “gridding” of Manhattan in the 18th century and of Churchill’s addiction to his map room to guide the war effort. With public access to GPS, the world gets changed after the Dutch invention of the TomTom automobile device, computerized mapping, and the advent of GPS-enabled smartphones and Google Earth.



I was personally disappointed how little mapping is connected to psychology and brain science. A brief touch is made on the misconception of women being poorer than men at reading maps. In one sentence, Dawkins is quoted that the ability to make a map to plan a hunting trip may have been important in hominid evolutionary success. Nothing meaningful is covered on the biology of animal migrations or the still baffling issue that navigation requires both compass and map. Maps of function in the brain gets a brief visit with phrenology maps and an image of Brodmann’s chart of gross functions. Not even the sensorimotor homunculus is mentioned. Hippocampal place cells get a tiny mention, despite being an intense subject of research for 40 years.



For about 10 years of my former neuroscience career I was concerned with how maps in the brain are achieved (does each growing fiber have a chemical coordinate system or do physical constrains, timing, competition, and activity shape the final pattern?). I was surprised to have to learn spherical trigonometry to assess compression in the visual map of the goldfish visual field on a reduced target. Even the very principle of topography in maps, that nearest neighbors a-b-c of one plane correspond to a-b-c in the mapping plane, is strangely absent. The discovery of discontinuous or interdigitating mappings in the brain (various layer and stripe systems) reveal that continuous mappings do not comprise the only solution. I see an analogy for the hand being enlarged in the sensory homunculus with the famous Steinberg New Yorker map of the Manhattanite’s view of the U.S., where beyond the edge of New York you get a patch of plain and a bump of the Rockies before you get a vision of Los Angeles and San Francisco in California.



Thus, I would say most would find this an easy read and useful way to learn something about a range of interesting aspects in the history of maps, but it misses the entertaining angles a writer like Bryson might pull off and lacks the depth and insights that might elucidate fundamental questions related to maps and human nature.

