Next book

DRAWING THE LINE

TALES OF MAPS AND CARTOCONTROVERSY

An intriguing dissection of how maps, with their pictorial clarity and aura of scientific objectivity, have exerted the power to persuade—and often mislead. Maps have a deceptively simple appearance, partly because the need for readablitiy requires cartographers to limit content, partly because mapmakers may be reflecting their own biases, according to Monmonier (Geography/Syracuse Univ.; How to Lie With Maps, not reviewed, etc.). He begins by recounting how the West German Arno Peters won worldwide media attention in the 1980s by criticizing the commonly used Mercator projection as Eurocentric- -and then proposed a revision that distorted lands to reflect his own leftist views. The story of the 1965 ``Vinland'' map, which purported to prove that Leif Ericson had discovered America several centuries before Columbus, becomes a tale of ethnic sensitivities (Italian-Americans were pressing then to have Columbus Day made a national holiday) and the hoodwinking of a highbrow institution (Yale accepted the map and was embarrassed by the 1974 revelation that it was a fraud). Monmonier equally displays an eye for the pungent detail (e.g., some US maps still feature ethnically insensitive place names such as Chinks Peak and Squaw Tits) and the ability to paint a broad historical context, as in detailing how one British geographer's warning about the importance of controlling ``the Heartland'' of Eastern Europe was ignored by his countrymen, until the Nazi-Soviet Pact proved him right. He also examines how maps have been used to settle boundary disputes between nations and neighbors; to redraw electoral districts to save incumbents' seats or gain power for minorities; to help bureaucrats convince a town to accept an incinerator, landfill, or nuclear waste dump; and, conversely, to protect against environmental catastrophes. A revealing analysis that shows how maps sometimes deserve a place in the unholy triumvirate of lies, damned lies, and statistics. (30 b&w drawings and 15 half-tones)

Pub Date: Dec. 20, 1994

ISBN: 0-8050-2581-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994

Categories:
Next book

IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

Next book

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

Categories:
Close Quickview