The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World

User Review: - More than a map
This is not a book about maps! This is a book about the philosophy of communications and how maps are used to influence our view of the world stage. "Maps are not pictures, they are arguments". When read this way, I would rate this presentation in the highest category along with "Laws of Form", "Chaos", and "Godel, Escher, Bach".

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User Review: - I didn't think it was possible, but it happened - a book on maps that I HATE
I love maps. I read cartography blogs for fun. I've read dozens of books on mapmaking, and I was eagerly awaiting this book.

I have to say that it is the worst book on maps I've ever read.

Upon first glance, the book looks great: big, thick, high quality paper - I was quite excited! This is exactly how a great map book should be presented.

The graphic design of the book, though, and the maps that the book chose to highlight were though, frankly, ugly. I kept flipping further into the book, waiting for the "good stuff". Sadly, the book was probably the ugliest cartography book I've ever opened.

And then I started reading the words.

Ugh.

This book is not for map lovers - its for people who want to love to hate maps.

It's absolutely true - maps can lie. Check out the enjoyable "How to Lie With Maps" by Mark Monmonier. I was looking forward to this book dissecting maps and showing their hidden biases. However, the content of the book is cloaked in pseudo intellectual humanities twaddle (I think that my despair reached its height about 20 pages in, when I came across the term "Foucaltian"). The authors come up with an elaborate theory of communication, whereby a map represents concepts (shown in their ugly and idiosyncratic personal notation as one big circle for the map and two nested circles for the concepts) and then the map propogates these concepts into the reader (more circles for the reader's head and for the cloned concepts), and then solid lines are thrown in to show the mapping of concept in the map to concept in the reader's head, and dashed lines are used to show the correspondence of the map to the reader's head.

The inane notation is a perfect example of something that is NOT well expressed with a map. However, it gets worse. Soon we're treated to multi-level diagrams, like something that a mentally ill person off his medicine might sketch on a subway station wall with a found, half melted candy bar: HERE is the MAP, and HERE is the first CONCEPT, which gives rise to the second CONCEPT, which emits a variety of DASHED LINES, which ...

Ugh.

While I think that great maps can be made by people who do not put graphic design first, the fact that the authors go out of their way to bash graphic designers involvement in map making serves to confirm that this is a book written by people who may practice in the field of cartography (or, at least, teach there), but who do not, fundamentally, love maps.

Again: this is THE. WORST. BOOK. on maps that I've ever read.

Save your money.