Overview

This volume ventures into terrain where even the most sophisticated map fails to lead--through the mapmaker's bias. Denis Wood shows how maps are not impartial reference objects, but rather instruments of communication, persuasion, and power. Like paintings, they express a point of view. By connecting us to a reality that could not exist in the absence of maps--a world of property lines and voting rights, taxation districts and enterprise zones--they embody and project the interests of their creators. Sampling the scope of maps available today, illustrations include Peter Gould's AIDS map, Tom Van Sant's map of the earth, U.S. Geological Survey maps, and a child's drawing of the world. THE POWER OF MAPS was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design.

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9780898624939

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Reviews

Wood's enthusiastic and scholarly contribution to the history of geography, and specifically the history of mapping, is widely acknowledged. The Power of Maps,. .has been widely reviewed, routinely used in teaching the history of geographical knowledge and rarely goes without citation in scholarship on the geopolitics of maps. --Jane Jacobs in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers <br> Denis Wood unmasks the map for what it is: a communication tool imbedded in culture, history, selected perspectives and--yes, sometimes--bias. Even the most simple map is a highly selected, generalized, and symbolized picture of something the mapmaker wishes to communicate... THE POWER OF MAPS explodes myths, offers insight, and arms the map user with the mapmaker's perspective. -- Whole Earth Review <br> The Power of Maps offers interesting and exciting insights into cartography... -- Fronteras <br>.,. .The last word on maps. -- The Trenton Times <br> He has some important, indeed compelling, things to say about maps...Wood not only incorporates a great store of historical detail into his essays, he sees maps as peculiar historical texts, as repositories of layers of knowledge and labor that can be revealed if we know how to read them....I highly recommend this unconventional book to historians of science of any period. -- Isis <br> Wood has written a book that deserves a wide readership. -- Cartography and Geographic Information Systems <br> This little book has a sober binding, but once past that, sobriety is cast to the winds...This is a book that Brian Harley--to whom it is dedicated--would have loved, particularly in its irreverence. The present reader finds almostall books about as twice a long as they need to be, so that he was surprised to find himself wishing that Wood had written at greater length, particularly in the final chapters on 'The interest served can be yours.' Wow, what a read. -- Mapline <br> Denis Wood's book The Power of Maps sheds a brilliant new light on our customary experience of maps....You will never look at any map the same way again. -- The Christian Science Monitor <br>

If compelled to cite only a single book on cartography to stock a desert-island shelf or to assign to the eager novice, this is the automatic choice....Although I have been drawing and poring over maps, as well as reading about them, since childhood, I received more revelations about their essential nature and larger meanings from this one powerful, disturbing, totally convincing essay than from all the other books, articles, and lectures on the subject I have ever encountered.' --Wilbur Zelinsky, The Pennsylvania State University <br> Combining both topical issues relevant to lay readers and serious scholarship, Denis Wood's The Power of Maps will provoke, amuse, tweak, and inform anyone who has had occasion to use, or merely peruse, a map--which is to say, everyone. It is a relentless entertainment--relentlessly challenging to traditional assumptions about cartography, relentlessly witty as it deconstructs (read: demolishes) the pretense of neutral, scientific' map-making, ande

If compelled to cite only a single book on cartography to stock a desert-island shelf or to assign to the eager novice, this is the automatic choice....Although I have been drawing and poring over maps, as well as reading about them, since childhood, I received more revelations about their essential nature and larger meanings from this one powerful, disturbing, totally convincing essay than from all the other books, articles, and lectures on the subject I have ever encountered.' --Wilbur Zelinsky, The Pennsylvania State University <br> Combining both topical issues relevant to lay readers and serious scholarship, Denis Wood's The Power of Maps will provoke, amuse, tweak, and inform anyone who has had occasion to use, or merely peruse, a map--which is to say, everyone. It is a relentless entertainment--relentlessly challenging to traditional assumptions about cartography, relentlessly witty as it deconstructs (read: demolishes) the pretense of neutral, scientific' map-making, andr

Author Information

Denis Wood, PhD, is an independent scholar living in Raleigh, North Carolina. He lectures widely and is the author of a dozen books and over 150 papers. From 1974 to 1996, he taught in the School of Design at North Carolina State University. In 1992, he curated the Power of Maps exhibition for the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design (remounted at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, in 1994), for which he wrote the book The Power of Maps. His other books include Rethinking the Power of Maps; Making Maps, Third Edition (coauthored with John Krygier); and Weaponizing Maps (coauthored with Joe Bryan).

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