Category: Book Reviews

The Sky Atlas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On page 96 the author notes that “the actual mapping of the heavens did not exist” in medieval Europe; on page 98, that “celestial cartography awaited its invention.” That these words appear nearly 40 percent of the way through The Sky Atlas (Simon & Schuster UK, 2019) should hint at what this book does and does not do. Despite appearances, this is not strictly speaking a history of celestial cartography. Do star maps appear, and are they discussed? Certainly. Absolutely. But not to the extent you might expect.

To the extent that this is a book by Edward Brooke-Hitching, whom you may remember from The Phantom Atlas (reviewed here) or The Golden Atlas (not seen), there are some thing that are familiar, at least in terms of design and presentation. The Sky Atlas is an illustrated history of observational astronomy from the ancients to the present day, aimed at a general audience, with short, digestible chapters. It’s expansive and inclusive—there are chapters on Jain and Mesoamerican astronomy, for example. And it has, as you might expect, lots and lots of illustrations, which given the timeline and scope of the book means artistic representations and maps of the skies from every era and multiple cultures.

You’re not getting what what you see in Nick Kanas’s Star Maps (reviewed here)—deep dives on specific celestial cartographers and their work (in Kanas’s case, from a collector’s perspective). The Sky Atlas gives celestial cartography a more ancillary role. Apart from a chapter on Hevelius, most of the text about maps takes place in the captions. Now in a book this illustrated there are a lot of captions, and the captions are not terse. But the maps themselves are there to illustrate and document the observations and discoveries that are the focus of this book—interesting in and of themselves, but not the main focus of the narrative. There is, to be sure, less of an audience for celestial cartography pur et dur, and this is a book for a general audience. So the direction the book takes is understandable. And as a collection of maps and illustrations it is quite lovely; as I said about The Phantom Atlas, “it’s the kind of map book you look at as much as you read it.” Even so, when something doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin, it should be noted.

Got this one from my public library.

The Sky Atlas by Edward Brooke-Hitching. Simon & Schuster UK, 17 Oct 2019, £25 (U.K. edition); Chronicle, 25 Feb 2020, $35 (U.S. edition). Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

The Library of Lost Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: The Library of Lost Maps

When it comes to books that present the maps of a single library or museum—take, for example, Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room, about the Bodleian, or Tom Harper’s Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library—there seems to be a standard, curatorial template, one that focuses on full-colour reproductions of the maps, each of which is accompanied by a short explanatory text. The maps, as objects, are the point.

The Library of Lost Maps (Bloomsbury, 2025) is about the maps held in the Map Room of University of College London. But author James Cheshire is doing something quite different here. Partly this is because UCL is neither the Bodleian nor the British Library. Their holdings are not remotely similar. There’s no equivalent of the Gough Map or the Selden Map here; the maps are more modern (19th and 20th century) and less rare and singular. UCL’s Map Library was a working map library, used by its staff for teaching and research, rather than something more curatorial.

But what the maps at UCL do have is stories attached—about how they were made, and about how they came to be in UCL’s hands. The Library of Lost Maps is simultaneously a story of the early days of UCL and its role in broadening education in Britain, its role as a repository for so many maps being produced during the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflicts, and its uncertain future as that role of map repository is increasingly seen as obsolete.

Continue reading “The Library of Lost Maps” →

Review: GeoAI

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: GeoAI

Save some room on the AI bandwagon for ArcGIS. This seems to be the central message of GeoAI: Artificial Intelligence in GIS, a slim (only 120-page) volume of articles and posts that previously appeared, for the most part, in Esri blogs and publications. They highlight examples and “real-life stories” of how Esri’s machine- and deep-learning tools have been successfully applied in the public, private and non-profit sectors. At a moment when “AI” is invariably a synecdoche for the awfulness that is generative AI, which I will not litigate here, it can be a challenge to remember that machine and deep learning tools, which have been included in ArcGIS since 2008, have all kinds of applications and benefits. (See Esri’s pretrained deep learning models for examples like feature detection, land-cover classification, and object tracking; see also their GeoAI landing page.) Calling these tools “GeoAI” strikes me as a way to package them to appeal to decision makers who are speedrunning their AI rollout, for better or worse. It’s those decision makers that this book is targeted to. Esri has something to sell them: this is the pitch.

I received an electronic review copy from the publisher.

GeoAI: Artificial Intelligence in GIS
ed. by Ismael Chivite, Nicholas Giner and Matt Artz
Esri, 2 Sep 2025, $40
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop

Review: Earth Shapers

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: Earth Shapers

The title of this book does not quite capture what Maxim Samson is doing. Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way isn’t really about shaping the earth, at least not in the way you or I might understand it, likewise neither is it about mapping in its literal sense. Samson uses “earth shaping” to mean something very specific: reshaping our world—physically, yes, but also in other ways—to make it “more interconnective,” as he sets out in the introduction.

In keeping with geography’s literal Greek meaning of ‘earth writing’, cultural geographers call attention to the notion that our planet’s various ‘cultural landscapes’, fashioned by humans onto the natural world, can be ‘read’ like story-filled texts. Earth shaping adopts the same principles, but adds to them a specific emphasis on the manifold power of geographical connections. Human history has been written in geographical connection—and when you know what to look for, these stories, both obscure and renowned, are everywhere. This book explores the reasons why we engage with our surroundings through connection, and how, through our actions, we write ourselves and a very specific history into the ground. (p. 2)

This is perhaps more theoretical than it needs to be. One could just as easily note that Samson’s first book, Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World, was about the lines that divide us; whereas Earth Shapers flips the script and explores the lines that connect us. And in Earth Shapers “lines” are just as important a word as “connect.”

Because everything in this book is a line. Each of this book’s eight chapters focuses on what is basically a connecting line or network of some sort: the Inca Empire’s Qhapaq Ñan; Mozambique’s separated colonial-era railway lines; the absolutely bonkers, 170-km planned linear city called The Line that is being built in northwestern Saudi Arabia (you can see the construction site in satellite imagery: it’s nuts); the Indigenous trails that endured after the imposition of Chicago’s regular street grid; the implications of Korea’s Baekdu-daegan for reunification.

What these lines principally have in common is scale. They’re transformative, but not necessarily in a physical sense. The Panama Canal is the obvious example of literal earth shaping, but the continent-level Great Green Wall, a project to combat desertification in the Sahel, has evolved into something a little less literal. And while the Baltic Way, as a single-day demonstration in 1989, though one that involved two million participants along a 675-km line, was ostensibly ephemeral, it was no less impactful.

It is in part the unexpected diversity of Samson’s wide-ranging examples—the connections between the connections, if that isn’t too meta—that makes Earth Shapers such an engaging read. This is the kind of book that fits in well with other books that gather geographical trivia and oddities, or islands (i.e., the sorts of books that Alastair Bonnett writes), though this one is decidedly more focused and substantive.

Earth Shapers was published in August by Profile Books in the U.K., and will come out in the U.S. from the University of Chicago Press later this month. I received an electronic advance galley from the latter.

Earth Shapers
by Maxim Samson
Profile Books, 7 Aug 2025, £22 / University of Chicago Press, 13 Oct 2025, $30
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop

Review: Telling Stories with Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: Telling Stories with Maps by Allen Carroll (Esri, 2025).

Fundamentally, Allen Carroll’s Telling Stories with Maps: Lessons from a Lifetime of Creating Place-Based Narratives is a book about using Esri’s ArcGIS StoryMaps service for creating digital narratives with maps. It’s of little use to anyone not using StoryMaps, but it’s not quite a user manual either. It presents the theory and practice of map-based storytelling, as applicable to the StoryMaps user base, with examples from Carroll’s long career, most notably at the National Geographic Society from 1983 to 2010, and then at Esri, where he went on to found their StoryMaps platform.

Carroll’s transition from National Geographic to Esri—a good chunk of Telling Stories with Maps serves as a memoir of Carroll’s working life—parallels a transition from analog to digital storytelling, and despite differences in medium, Carroll demonstrates that map-based narratives cover both the National Geographic maps (think the back sides of the map inserts) and interactive maps.

As StoryMaps emerged, one tool at a time, it presented a challenge: as Carroll notes, its users were GIS professionals who were not necessarily equipped to be storytellers—to be able to craft a narrative that held the attention of the reader. Telling Stories with Maps is an attempt to address that knowledge gap, with a bit of theory of narrative and a boatload of real-world examples (collected online here, because in-book screenshots can only do so much). As such it’s a book about what StoryMaps is for—what you can do with it, the best way to use it—rather than a step-by-step instruction manual.

I received an electronic review copy from the publisher.

Telling Stories with Maps
by Allen Carroll
Esri, 10 Jun 2025
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop

Review: Mapmatics

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The first intimation I had that maps involved mathematics was when I looked up a map projection and came face to face with the equation that generated it. Math was never my strongest subject, so it’s probably for the best that I never went into cartography. Especially since it turns out that there’s a lot more math hidden behind the maps we use on a daily basis than you might think, a point demonstrated in detail by Paulina Rowińska’s book, Mapmatics, which came out in June from Picador in the U.K. and from Belknap in the U.S. in September.

Book cover: Mapmatics (US edition)

Cartographic problems are often mathematical problems: Gauss’s Remarkable Theorem demonstrates that a flat projection of a round globe must necessarily add distortion. Surveying by triangulation is simple trigonometry. The coastline paradox, whereby the length of a coastline depends on the scale at which it’s measured, is because the coastline is fractal. Real-world navigational problems can be solved via topology and graph theory, algorithms and heuristics. The takeaway from this book is these things are math, and that math is at the heart of so much of this.

Rowińska is a mathematician and science writer, and she very much approaches her subject from the math side of things. Making the subject accessible to non-mathematicians is no small challenge, especially when moving to subjects that, while absolutely part of the discipline of mathematics, don’t obviously code as such to normies. Graph theory, number theory, probability density function and topology make their appearances. (I confess to being surprised at the omission of GPS, but now that I think about it, GPS is really about timekeeping and physics.) No less a challenge is finding the balance between explaining the mathematical concepts and explaining how they apply to mapping, and doing so in a way that doesn’t completely lose the plot and turn the whole thing into a math textbook with cartographic examples.

Book cover for the U.K. edition of Paulina Rowińska’s Mapmatics (Picador).

On balance I think Rowińska mostly succeeds: there were plenty of points where the math was still esoteric to me, but I still got that, yes, this was math, and here’s what it does in these cases. As the book progresses the math gets a bit more remote from popular understanding, and the map side of things is less about maps than the data being mapped, but even then the examples are absolutely real-world and relatable (gerrymandering, disease mapping), and there are plenty of a-ha moments coming from the math behind familiar puzzles like the travelling salesman problem and the four-colour theorem.

I received an electronic review copy from the publisher.

Related: Map Books of 2024.

Mapmatics
by Paulina Rowińska
Picador, 6 Jun 2024 (UK) | Belknap, 17 Sep 2024 (US)
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Review: Atlas of Iowa

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Most of the maps in the Atlas of Iowa, which came out last month from University of Iowa Press, are thematic maps: mainly graduated symbol maps and (to a lesser extent) choropleth maps, that show data at the county or (to a lesser extent) census district or precinct level. These are functional maps, means to an end rather than impressive examples of cartography in their own right. They do the job they were designed to do, which is to present the history, demographics and economics of America’s 29th state in cartographic form. And by and large they succeed: I’ve never so much as set foot in Iowa, but the Atlas of Iowa taught me a great deal about it.

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Review: Atlas of Design, Vol. 6

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Late last year I received, as a review copy, the sixth volume of the Atlas of Design. Things being what they are around here, there has been somewhat of a gap between receiving it, reading it, and saying something about it. But it’s worth saying something about that volume now, and the Atlas of Design in general, for at least one small reason I’ll get to in a moment.

I’ve mentioned the Atlas of Design series before, but it’s worth introducing it properly. Published every two years since 2012 by the North American Cartographic Information Society, the Atlas of Design is powered by volunteer editors and contributor submissions. Nobody’s getting paid for working on or appearing in these volumes—though it must be said that many of these maps are commercial ventures (posters available for sale at the mapper’s website) or works for hire (National Geographic and the Washington Post are represented in volume six), so the mapmakers aren’t doing this just for the exposure.

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Review: The Cartographers

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Book cover: The CartographersI bet you’ve been wondering what I thought about Peng Shepherd’s novel The Cartographers (William Morrow/Orion, March 2022). After all, it’s a literary fantasy about maps: is it even possible for a book to be more relevant to my interests? Well, wonder no longer, because I’ve reviewed it for Strange Horizons.

This piece is a little bit different from the usual review, in that it examines The Cartographers in the context of mysteries and fantasy that deploy similar map tropes, as well as the idées fixes our culture has about maps. As I write in the review, there’s an awful lot for me to unpack:

I have been writing about maps for nearly two decades, and in that time I have encountered many works of fiction that incorporate maps and map tropes into their storytelling, whether as paratexts or as plot elements, and I have never encountered a story, at any length, as thoroughly encompassed by maps as The Cartographers. It’s not just that almost every character in the book works with maps in some fashion, whether as a cartographer, artist, librarian, map dealer, or technician. Nor are maps just a plot point—they are the point. The Cartographers is a Stations of the Map: its pilgrimage follows a path that touches on so many aspects of maps and mapmaking, from academic cartography to fire insurance maps. It spends time on the purpose and meaning of maps: it aspires to an almost Socratic dialogue. It deploys familiar fantasy genre tropes about maps. But it’s structured as a mystery novel, and opens with a murder.

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Review: Clock and Compass

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Mark Monmonier’s latest book, Clock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a Real Address—out today from the University of Iowa Press—is a spinoff of sorts. This relatively slim volume does a deep dive on one of the inventions featured in his previous book, Patents and Cartographic Inventions: the clock system invented and promoted by John Byron Plato (1867-1966).

Book cover: Clock and CompassThe clock system was an attempt to solve a specific problem: well into the 20th century, farmhouses in the United States lacked proper addresses. Without a street number or even a street name, navigating to a given farmhouse could be a real challenge. Plato’s solution, invented while he was trying his hand at farming in Colorado, was to assign each farmhouse an identifier based on its clock position, with the clock centred on the nearest town. The clock system saw its greatest uptake in upstate New York, where Plato relocated shortly thereafter and started his business selling the maps and directories based on his system. In a marketing turn worthy of Phyllis Pearsall, Plato cultivated his previous status as a farmer, citing as his inspiration a sale lost because his buyer couldn’t find his house.

It’s tempting to think of the clock system as the what3words of a century ago: a proprietary navigational aid promising to make wayfinding simpler. And apart from the considerable curiousity value of an obsolete but unusual (and therefore interesting) system, the story of Plato and his system is pure American hustle: the rise and fall of a business from patent to product to collapse in the face of the Great Depression, to an unsuccessful attempt at restarting in Ohio. The indefatigable Plato even persisted with his system while working for the federal government in various capacities during the 1930s. Meanwhile, after Plato’s patent had expired, a modified compass system—using compass points rather than hours on a clock face—persisted in upstate New York until 1940.

Apart from his system, and the maps and ephemera it produced, Plato left few traces in the historical record, which makes him a challenging subject for a biographer. Monmonier gamely reconstructs what he can from patent filings, tax rolls, employment records and news coverage. Lacking more verbose evidence, Monmonier even resorts to producing maps of Plato’s life from those records, which seems appropriate given the subject matter and even helps illuminate several points. The end result is necessarily fragmentary and inductive, but a portrait of Plato nevertheless manages to emerge: a restless man who after dabbling in many things, changing gears and relocating many times, hit upon an idea that was kind of neat and tried to ride it for all it was worth.

I received an electronic review copy of this book from the publisher.

Book cover: Clock and CompassClock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a Real Address
by Mark Monmonier
University of Iowa Press, 12 Apr 2022
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Review: North American Maps for Curious Minds

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Book cover: North American Maps for Curious MindsNorth American Maps for Curious Minds, written by Matthew Bucklan and Victor Cizek and featuring maps and illustrations by Jack Dunnington, is the second book in the Maps for Curious Minds series: Brilliant Maps for Curious Minds came out in 2019, and Wild Maps for Curious Minds is scheduled to come out this fall. The formula appears to be the same across all three books: 100 maps and infographics, divided by theme into chapters. In the case of North American Maps for Curious Minds, the 100 maps are sorted into seven chapters: Geography; Politics and Power; Nature; Culture and Sports; People and Populations; Lifestyle and Health; and Industry and Transport.

The series is a spinoff of the Brilliant Maps website, and can be seen as an attempt to render viral map memes in book form: if this book is any indication, the maps themselves are the sort that tend to get shared across social media platforms. One I recognized right away was no. 8: the first country you’ll reach going east or west from every point on the coast. Their appearance between hard covers is to be honest a bit unexpected, and to be honest, the translation from screen to page doesn’t always work.

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Elsewhere (The Age of Islands)

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Elsewhere (book cover)It’s ostensibly another quirky book about islands—there are, to be sure, a lot of them out on that subject—but Alastair Bonnett’s latest book has an urgency and pertinence to it that is belied by the relatively anodyne title it bears in its U.S. edition. Elsewhere: A Journey into Our Age of Islands makes it sounds like any other light travelogue with an innocuous point of view. Far better is the title it had for its original British edition: The Age of Islands: In Search of New and Disappearing Islands. Which is what it’s about: islands that have been created, and islands that are going away—by artificial and natural means.

Though when it comes to building islands, the artificial gets the bulk of Bonnett’s attention—but then people have been building islands at a rather brisk clip lately; volcanoes can’t keep up. Bonnett visits the various kinds, from the Netherlands’ polders to Dubai’s crass luxury archipelagos—and its imitators in Panama and Hainan—to China’s various military islands built up to buttress its claims to the South China Sea, to the expansion of Hong Kong’s airport. There’s a lot of money involved in these projects, not least because people pay a premium for proximity to the sea, but Bonnett repeatedly makes the point that climate change means these islands will be short-lived. “It’s odd, then, that building small flat islands in warmer latitudes is such big business. One day the dots will join.”1

In the book’s smaller second part, Bonnett turns to a consideration of islands that are disappearing. And while volcanoes, earthquakes and even nuclear tests can be the cause of islands being removed from the map, the main point here is anthropogenetic climate change. Bonnett travels from Panama’s San Blas Islands to Tonga to the Scilly Isles southwest of England to survey the imminent and the inevitable. The contrast is stark and deliberate. The map is being remade in both ways: islands are being built while others are on the brink of disappearing, but the benefits and damages are not evenly distributed. Bonnett does not pull his punches, but he is less angry than he ought to be. “We keep building islands even as natural islands are disappearing. The new ones are not very high and they are vulnerable to storms and sea-surges. Are we crazy?”2 The question more or less answers itself.

I received an electronic review copy of this book from the University of Chicago Press.

Elsewhere (book cover)Elsewhere: A Journey into Our Age of Islands
by Alastair Bonnett
University of Chicago Press, 17 Nov 2020
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The Age of Islands: In Search of New and Disappearing Islands
by Alastair Bonnett
Atlantic Books, 7 May 2020 (U.K. edition)
Amazon UK | Apple Books

The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Eternal City (cover)Something I often do when reviewing a book is talk about it in terms of the expectations of its potential readers—particularly if readers might come to a book with expectations that the book does not meet, because the book is doing something different. If you’re expecting The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps, written by the art historian Jessica Maier and published last November by the University of Chicago Press, to be basically A History of Rome in 100 Maps, it isn’t: the count is more like three dozen. This doesn’t mean that The Eternal City is a slight book—it most certainly is not, though at 199 pages it’s a bit shorter than, say, A History of America in 100 Maps (272 pages).

But counting maps would miss the difference in Maier’s approach. To invoke xkcd, this is depth-first rather than breadth-first: there are fewer maps here, but they’re discussed in much more depth than the two-page spreads of the hundred-map books, and provided with much more context. This is a history of Rome in maps in which history, Rome and maps all get their proper share of attention.

Continue reading “The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps” →

Underground Cities

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Amazon (Canada, UK)
Bookshop

Mark Ovenden has made a career of publishing books about transportation systems and their maps that are both comprehensive and copiously illustrated. These include books about transit maps, railway maps and airline maps, as well as books about specific transit systems like the London Underground and the Paris Metro.

His latest, Underground Cities (Frances Lincoln, 22 Sep), is in some ways a natural progression from his past work: in the introduction he muses on the link between transit geekery and wondering about “what else lies down there beyond the walls” (p. 6). But in other ways this is quite a different book.

Continue reading “Underground Cities” →

Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The March 2020 issue (PDF) of Calafia, the journal of the California Map Society, has as its theme the mapping of space. It also has something from me in it: my review of the third edition of Nick Kanas’s Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography. An excerpt:

It’s important to remember a book’s target audience—its imagined ideal reader. In the case of Star Maps this is Kanas’s younger self, who came to map collecting via his lifelong interest in amateur astronomy. “I was frustrated that there was not a single book on celestial cartography that could inform me about the various aspects of my collecting,” he writes in the preface to the first edition. “What I needed was a book that not only was a primer for the collector but also had sufficient reference detail to allow me to identify and understand my maps. Nothing like this appeared, so I decided to write such a book some day” (p. xxi). In other words, for a compendium this is a surprisingly personal book, one that reflects his own journey into the subject and, presumably, his interests as a collector.

I’ll post the full review on The Map Room once I’ve checked my draft against the published copy. In the meantime, check out the issue of Calafia (PDF) in which it appears. (Update, 24 Jun 2020: Here it is.)

Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography
3rd edition
by Nick Kanas
Springer Praxis, Sept 2019
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