LOOK OUT

A robust inquiry into “seeking the bigger picture.”

The late philosopher Roland Barthes had a fear of heights and a hatred of mountains. Had he been around to read McPherson’s book, he might have reconsidered: Seeing from up high can yield awe, and while “awe often carries an undercurrent of fear,” it can provoke some, if you will, elevated thoughts. It can also yield awareness of what surveyors call “ground truth,” a point that McPherson, author of Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, addresses with his account of John B. Bachelder. An artist who arrived at the Gettysburg battlefield two days after the fighting there had stopped, Bachelder drew an aerial-perspective map that was so detailed that, after publication in 1864, thousands of military officers on both sides scrutinized it; in the end, after collating their findings, “only a single regiment was moved.” From there McPherson moves on to explore the 19th-century “mania” for bird’s-eye-view maps made by artists who “had learned well the perspective drawing of Renaissance masters.” McPherson darts from subject to subject, from the workings of aerial intelligence in modern spycraft to the AI targeting systems being used to bombard Gaza and the proliferation of drones. The narrative is thus rather diffuse—he himself admits to “attempting to keep many topics in view”—and the writing can sometimes drift into the purply abstract (“What is the length of a feeling? Totality lasted minutes, or an eternity, or was nothing at all.”) And while there are better books and articles on perception from above, including Barry Lopez’s peerless essay “Flight” and William Langewiesche’s Inside the Sky, McPherson’s book has some fine moments, perhaps most memorably his slog up a Texas mountain to look at a clock that’s meant to tick away for the next 10,000 years, taking a long view indeed.

Though somewhat disjointed, a book with plenty of high points.