A challenging but edifying read about the power of maps.
An in-depth, revisionist plunge into the extraordinary world of maps.
Rankin, a Yale University historian, argues that it’s time to reimagine what a map can be and how it can be used. We now have non-geographic maps of everything from social networks to the human genome. “Any map is now just a representation of data, a special case of visualization.” Cartography becomes radical when “it embraces the inherent uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity of both our data and the world itself.” Rankin organizes his lavishly illustrated book around seven basic features of maps: boundaries, layers, people, projections, color, scale, and time. Using Chicago as an example, he describes how community area boundary maps from the 1930s provided valuable sociological data that could result in changes to benefit people’s daily lives. Rankin then discusses the work of Arthur Robinson, who transformed “cartography from a technical craft into an expansive social science of visual communication” from his position as chief of the Map Division during World War II, advancing the concept of layering in maps. Rankin also delves into Indigenous mapping and Lincoln’s “slave-map.” The author argues that, with maps, we “need to match the projection to the particular we of the map, knowing that there are many we that don’t include us at all.” He’s quite good at covering the politics of artificial and natural colors in maps, intentional and unintentional. He ponders whether scale comparisons are always colonial and objectifying. Lastly, he covers the dilemma of how maps can handle time, the rise of photographic cartography, photo-cinematic maps, and what Rankin calls “spatial memory,” maps that show a relationship between the past and the present. These values he proposes for radical cartography in maps—uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity—have the potential to be a “tool for change.”
A challenging but edifying read about the power of maps.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780525559795
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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