I bought this at Schiphol Airport as I had nothing else to read ... doesn't sound much of a recommendation, does it? - but the small cover photo of two surveyors perched on a precarious butte, though simple, begged my attention. It succeeded - and grabbed!

This book is deceptively large, due to the small font, tight spacing and thin margins.
But it needs to be:- there is so much information crammed in here ... all that the layman should ever need to know about maps & mapmaking, surveyors & surveying and discoverers and their discoveries. My only complaint is that there are no colour illustrations, which would have amplified the descriptions greatly.

The narrative style of Pulitzer winner Mr.Wilford makes for easy, yet highly informative reading, taking us from early Chinese maps with their variable scale to modern digital mapping of the cosmos, all the while inserting interesting snippets of fact and conjecture. He draws heavily on other authors (showing the depth of his research), but only to illustrate and augment the narrative. I took longer than usual to read this book, simply because I wished to savour the experience.

Required reading for all who wish to know how we came to view the world as we see it now. ...

I agree with the other reviews about this book, but what I think is missing is emphasis on the more recent usages of maps. At first maps were created to fill in the gaps of undiscovered areas of the world. This is enough to excite the imagination and enthusiasm of anyone with a bent toward histroy. But, maps are now becoming devices for use by agencies and persons more interested in distribution of ideas, beliefs, and the like. Mapmakers have turned their efforts inward as well as outward, as in the case of the maping of Mars and the Moon, to meet the demands of Social Scientists in what we can only hope will be for the benefit of mankind as before. There will be hardly a book, be it historical, about art, or science that can be read after reading this one but that relevence will shine through for the benefit of one discipline or another. Rather than get too involved, however, I recemmend the book be read for the enjoyment of learning. It is well written and most informative.

"The Mapmakers" by John Noble Wilford (ISBN 0-375-40929-7) published by Knopf/Random House in August 2000 is an updated version of the 1981 text. The revisions reflect the radical changes in the process of map-making that we already take for granted. It is of interest to anyone who has ever paddled along a complex shoreline, looked at a map, and thought " I could be here, there or anywhere". Or to anyone who has spent a winter dreaming of a lake or river, seen only in the mind's eye aided by a "window" created by maps...

This book covers the history of cartography or map-making from ancient times to the present day . Drawing on various sources, it explores the "need" to create maps both as a concrete form of communication describing the physical location of objects and our relationship to them, as well as the philosophical beliefs which can make "maps lie" based on the ideological bias of the map-maker, and the prejudices of the user. It traces in chronological format the evolution of maps (beginning in pre-history judging from some cave paintings) , from the Near East and Egypt in the period from 2000BC, to Greek philosophical conceptions of the world, to the civil engineering and mapping of the Romans, to the laughably inaccurate and fabricated maps of the early Middle Ages reflecting Europe's inward turning in the pre-Renaissance period. The Age of Discovery and the slow progress in developing maps for coastal trade reaching further and further from home, the new ( and rediscovered) technologies that aided the "mapping of both the African route to Asia, as well as the nascent understanding of the New World coastline, are covered in great detail.

Time is given to the development of map projections, problems of determining latitude and longitude, early and modern navigational devices, as well as the individuals who pioneered new concepts in mapping, often with their achievements lying fallow for another 100 years or more. Problems of mapping even long settled areas like France are discussed in the context of new systems of measuring land, as well as the State's "need" to quantify it's holdings in a more scientific manner.

The author develops his concepts within the book like small streams joining to form a great river, over a great distance and time. The final third of the book is a torrent , as the various technologies are refined, demand for accurate maps increases, and communication becomes almost instant. In the discussion of the modern era there is a already a quaintness to the debates as to whether map making might ever be "automated", or derived from computerized data alone. In the final chapters the book moves beyond the mapping of coast lines, cities and Earth itself, to mapping projects of Mars and the Universe itself. Yet the author retains his premise that maps locate the human mind in space and time, and are as essential to humans as language itself. An interesting premise early in the book is that the creation of maps may have pre-dated the complexities of language. Certainly anyone who has ever had someone "draw them a map" when words and language were insufficient , might be intrigued by both the history and ideas contained in this book!

This is something of a history of recent astronomy as related in the Times. The oldest story is Walter Sullivan's report on the discovery of the cosmic background radiation in 1965. Most of the others, though, are from the eighties and nineties. The coverage is divided into sections: new telescopes and new technology, planetary exploration, potential life on Mars, extrasolar planets, the life of stars, black holes, missing mass, the new cosmology, the age of the universe, the fate of the universe, looking for ET, and theories of everything. Each section has a half-dozen or so breaking stories on related topics, which gives the text a greater sense of immediacy than the usual explanatory text.

Not only are these good stories in their own right, but they're also excellent examples of good science writing. (One of the physicists involved with the discovery of the CMBR even told Sullivan that he didn't understand the significance of his finding until he read his article.) The only weaknesses are the diagrams, which sometimes verge on being too small to read, and the episodic nature of the text, with each article being relatively self-contained, rather than being one chapter in an explanatory book. But these are minor complaints about an overall excellent book.

Cosmic Dispatches: Reports On Astronomy And Cosmology by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Noble Wilford is a guide to the very latest findings of astronomy and cosmology. The paperback edition contains six new essays on the discovery of new multiplanet systems and the question of time before the Big Bang. Among the vast compendium of other scientific issues covered in assorted essays are the future of exploration on Mars, the possibility of life on other planets, and the true age of the Universe. Cosmic Dispatches is a wondrous, informative, and mind-expanding book, highly recommended for students of astronomy and the non-specialist general reader ready to embark on the ultimate voyage of cosmic discovery!

For the most part, the author seems to have pretty good information for the time of the book's printing, but for anyone who wants to read this book on purely scientific terms, be warned; there are several places where the book goes awry, for example: the author states that tracks of tyrranosaurus indicate that it was a solitary animal, occasionally hunting in pairs. Problem: no tracks of a t. rex have been discovered to date, a decade and a half after the writing. Aside from that and a few other points, though, the book is good reading.