Drawing the Line : Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy

Very interesting ideas and presentation. However, I repeatedly stumbled over - logic errors? Omissions? that detracted from the argument, or at least distracted. For instance, while discussing the Peters projection, at one point the author mentions a study that determined that Peters' parallels

Show More

were off by 'as much as four millimeters, a huge distance in the world of cartometry'. But he never mentions at what scale they're displaced - a literal four millimeters is irrelevant, but if it's at a scale of 1mm=100 miles, that's considerably more important. We're never given the necessary information to determine the importance of the matter. In another vein, he describes a name-change after Pakistan became independent - 'Campbellpur thus became Attock City'. I'm not sure about the Attock - that could be a Pakistani word - but City is definitely not and would be difficult to say. Perhaps it became Attockabad, or Attockpur? Actually (I looked it up), the name of the city is Attock, which is also the name of the district - so in English 'city' is added to distinguish. The peculiar choice of names to highlight seriously distracted me from the points he was trying to make. Overall, I found his subjects interesting, his writing less than gripping, and his points of view on the various maps and matters variable and, for my taste, too firmly centered on the map itself and not enough on the broader subject. That might have been expected - it is his focus - but it made the book somewhat difficult to slog through for me. I thought I enjoyed maps - it seems I enjoy what maps can tell me, instead. I'm glad I read it, I doubt I'll reread, and I won't seek out other books by the author.

Show Less