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After the Map
Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century
William Rankin
University of Chicago Press, 2016
For most of the twentieth century, maps were indispensable. They were how governments understood, managed, and defended their territory, and during the two world wars they were produced by the hundreds of millions. Cartographers and journalists predicted the dawning of a “map-minded age,” where increasingly state-of-the-art maps would become everyday tools. By the century’s end, however, there had been decisive shift in mapping practices, as the dominant methods of land surveying and print publication were increasingly displaced by electronic navigation systems.
           
In After the Map, William Rankin argues that although this shift did not render traditional maps obsolete, it did radically change our experience of geographic knowledge, from the God’s-eye view of the map to the embedded subjectivity of GPS. Likewise, older concerns with geographic truth and objectivity have been upstaged by a new emphasis on simplicity, reliability, and convenience. After the Map shows how this change in geographic perspective is ultimately a transformation of the nature of territory, both social and political.
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Air Apparent
How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather
Mark Monmonier
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Weather maps have made our atmosphere visible, understandable, and at least moderately predictable. In Air Apparent Mark Monmonier traces debates among scientists eager to unravel the enigma of storms and global change, explains strategies for mapping the upper atmosphere and forecasting disaster, and discusses efforts to detect and control air pollution. Fascinating in its scope and detail, Air Apparent makes us take a second look at the weather map, an image that has been, and continues to be, central to our daily lives.

"Clever title, rewarding book. Monmonier . . . offers here a basic course in meteorology, which he presents gracefully by means of a history of weather maps." —Scientific American

"Mark Monmonier is onto a winner with Air Apparent. . . . It is good, accessible science and excellent history. . . . Read it." —Fred Pearce, New Scientist

"[Air Apparent] is a superb first reading for any backyard novice of weather . . . but even the veteran forecaster or researcher will find it engaging and, in some cases, enlightening." —Joe Venuti, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

"Monmonier is solid enough in his discussion of geographic and meteorological information to satisfy the experienced weather watcher. But even if this information were not presented in such a lively and engaging manner, it would still hook most any reader who checks the weather map every morning or who sits happily entranced through a full cycle of forecasts on the Weather Channel."—Michael Kennedy, Boston Globe
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All Over the Map
True Heroes of Texas Music
Michael Corcoran
University of North Texas Press, 2017

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All Over the Map
True Heroes of Texas Music
By Michael Corcoran
University of Texas Press, 2005

From country and blues to rap and punk, Texas music is all over the map, figuratively and literally. Texas musicians have pioneered new musical genres, instruments, and playing styles, proving themselves to be daring innovators who often call the tune for musicians around the country and even abroad. To introduce some of these trailblazing Texas musicians to a wider audience and pay tribute to their accomplishments, Michael Corcoran profiles thirty-two of them in All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music.

Corcoran covers musicians who work in a wide range of musical genres, including blues, gospel, country, rap, indie rock, pop, Cajun, Tejano, conjunto, funk, honky-tonk, rockabilly, rhythm and blues, and Western swing. His focus is on underappreciated artists, pioneers who haven't fully received their due. He also includes well-known musicians who've been underrated, such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Selena, and invites us to take a closer look at the unique talents of these artists. Corcoran's profiles come from articles he wrote for the Dallas Morning News, Austin American-Statesman, Houston Press, and other publications, which have been expanded and updated for this volume. His musical detective work even uncovers a case of mistaken identity (Washington Phillips) and corrects much misinformation on Blind Willie Johnson and Arizona Dranes. Corcoran closes the book with lively pieces on the Austin music scene and its most famous, if no longer extant, clubs, as well as his personal lists of the forty greatest Texas songs of all time and the twenty-five essential CDs for Texas music fans.

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Beyond the Map
Unruly Enclaves, Ghostly Places, Emerging Lands and Our Search for New Utopias
Alastair Bonnett
University of Chicago Press, 2018
New islands are under construction or emerging because of climate change. Eccentric enclaves and fantastic utopian experiments are multiplying. Once-secret fantasy gardens are cracking open their doors to outsiders. Our world is becoming stranger by the day—and Alastair Bonnett observes and captures every fascinating change.
 
In Beyond the Map, Bonnett presents stories of the world’s most extraordinary spaces—many unmarked on any official map—all of which challenge our assumptions about what we know—or think we know—about our world. As cultural, religious and political boundaries ebb and flow with each passing day, traditional maps unravel and fragment. With the same adventurous spirit he effused in the acclaimed Unruly Places, Bonnett takes us to thirty-nine incredible spots around the globe to explore these changing boundaries and stimulate our geographical imagination. Some are tied to disruptive contemporary political turbulence, such as the rise of ISIL, Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. Others explore the secret places not shown on Google Earth or reflect fast-changing landscapes.
 
Beyond the Map journeys out into a world of mysterious, daunting and magical spaces. It is a world of hidden cultures and ghostly memories, of uncountable new islands and curious stabs at paradise. From the phantom tunnels of the Tokyo subway to a stunning movie-set re-creation of 1950s-era Moscow; from the caliphate of the Islamic State to virtual cybertopias—this book serves as an imaginative guide to the farthest fringes of geography.
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Cold Comfort
Life at the Top of the Map
Barton Sutter
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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The Creature in the Map
A Journey to El Dorado
Charles Nicholl
University of Chicago Press, 1997
"This brilliantly written reconstruction of Sir Walter Raleigh's 1595 South American journey combines painstaking scholarship, vivid travelogue, and an intuitive sensitivity for the many meanings of the El Dorado myth. . . . Nicholl brings this six-week expedition to life. . . . A rare treat for both intellect and imagination."—Kirkus Reviews

"Walter Raleigh . . . was one of those Elizabethan all-rounders who still seem staggeringly larger than life. . . . Mr. Nicholl's cogent reconstruction of the journey uses Raleigh's own account, 'The Discoverie of Guiana'—part truth, part advertising, part rhapsody—and much well-found ancillary material."—Anthony Bailey, New York Times

"Like The Reckoning, his brilliant account of the murder of Christopher Marlowe, Nicholl's new book might be called an exercise in historical conjuring. The Creature in the Map is an effort not only to analyse but also to call into presence the lived experience of the voyage Raleigh undertook in 1595 to the Orinoco Delta in what is now Venezuela."—Stephen Greenblatt, Times Literary Supplement

"Charles Nicholl belongs to an elite company, that of historians who know how to make research into arcane matters and distant times as engrossing as In Cold Blood or All the President's Men."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
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Decolonizing the Map
Cartography from Colony to Nation
Edited by James R. Akerman
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Almost universally, newly independent states seek to affirm their independence and identity by making the production of new maps and atlases a top priority. For formerly colonized peoples, however, this process neither begins nor ends with independence, and it is rarely straightforward. Mapping their own land is fraught with a fresh set of issues: how to define and administer their territories, develop their national identity, establish their role in the community of nations, and more. The contributors to Decolonizing the Map explore this complicated relationship between mapping and decolonization while engaging with recent theoretical debates about the nature of decolonization itself.
 
These essays, originally delivered as the 2010 Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, encompass more than two centuries and three continents—Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Ranging from the late eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth, contributors study topics from mapping and national identity in late colonial Mexico to the enduring complications created by the partition of British India and the racialized organization of space in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. A vital contribution to studies of both colonization and cartography, Decolonizing the Map is the first book to systematically and comprehensively examine the engagement of mapping in the long—and clearly unfinished—parallel processes of decolonization and nation building in the modern world.
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Fathering the Map
New and Selected Later Poems
Robert Pack
University of Chicago Press, 1993
"Poetry," wrote Wordsworth, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is the countenance of all Science." Robert Pack's new book is a heady mixture of the finer spirit.

A selection from his last five books, along with a collection of new poems, Fathering the Map takes us from the personal reflections distilled in the lyrics of Waking to My Name (1980) to the worldly reckonings of Inheritance (1992) and back again. In the dramatic monologues of Faces in a Single Tree (1984), in the narrative of a wayward life from womb to double ending in Clayfield Rejoices, Clayfield Laments (1987), in a cosmic tour conducted by the physicist Heinz Pagels with Before It Vanishes (1990), Pack has fashioned poems of intimate experience, scientific meditations, philosophical wonder, poems that breathe the knowledge of man and woman, young and old, artist and human animal.

Pack's work has won the acclaim of writers, critics, and readers from Robert Penn Warren to Cynthia Ozick to Stephen Jay Gould, who comments that the "precious contacts of science and poetry are now sadly rare, but Bob Pack revitalizes the ancient union with incisive poems that sing with lyricism or bite with insight—but always seem to add wisdom to the scientist's epigram."

"The poet improves his style and spirit as he extends his reach," Howard Nemerov has written, and in his new work Pack reaches back to some of his earliest memories, and so forward to a personal mythology that circles from the primal instant to the present ecological crisis. "Robert Pack's poetry is deeply rooted in his won family life," Richard Wilbur has remarked, "and yet his imagination has always included us all."

And Cynthia Ozick has said of Pack's poetry: "We rejoice as we read."
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Finding the Right Place on the Map
Central and Eastern European Media Change in a Global Perspective
Edited by Karol Jakubowicz and Miklós Sükösd
Intellect Books, 2008
Finding the Right Place on the Map is an international comparison of the media systems and democratic performance of the media in post-communist countries. From a comparative east-west perspective, this groundbreaking volume analyzes issues of commercial media, social exclusion, and consumer capitalism. With topics ranging from the civil society approach, public service broadcasting, fandom, and the representation of poverty, each chapter considers a different aspect of the trends and problems surrounding the international media. This volume is an up-to-date overview of what media transformation has meant for post-communist countries in the past two decades. 
 
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Homeless In Paradise
A Map of the Terrain
Robert Rosenthal
Temple University Press, 1993

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In the Memory of the Map
A Cartographic Memoir
Christopher Norment
University of Iowa Press, 2012
Throughout his life, maps have been a source of imagination and wonder for Christopher Norment. Mesmerized by them since the age of eight or nine, he found himself courted and seduced by maps, which served functional and allegorical roles in showing him worlds that he might come to know and helping him understand worlds that he had already explored.

Maps may have been the stuff of his dreams, but they sometimes drew him away from places where he should have remained firmly rooted. In the Memory of the Map explores the complex relationship among maps, memory, and experience—what might be called a “cartographical psychology” or “cartographical history.” Interweaving a personal narrative structured around a variety of maps, with stories about maps as told by scholars, poets, and fiction writers, this book provides a dazzlingly rich personal and intellectual account of what many of us take for granted.

A dialog between desire and the maps of his life, an exploration of the pleasures, utilitarian purposes, benefits, and character of maps, this rich and powerful personal narrative is the matrix in which Norment embeds an exploration of how maps function in all our lives. Page by page, readers will confront the aesthetics, mystery, function, power, and shortcomings of maps, causing them to reconsider the role that maps play in their lives.

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A Map of Hope
Women's Writing on Human Rights—An International Literary Anthology
Agosín, Marjorie
Rutgers University Press, 1999

The first international anthology to explore women’s human rights from a literary perspective.

More than half a century after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, women throughout the world still struggle for social and political justice. Many fight back with the only tools of resistance they possess—words. A Map of Hope presents a collection of 77 extraordinary literary works documenting the ways women writers have spoken out about human rights issues.

Writers young and old, known and unknown, explore the dimensions of terror, the unspeakable atrocities of war, and the possibilities of resistance and refusal against all odds. Their poems, essays, memoirs, and brief histories examine issues that affect the condition of women in war, prison camps, exile, and as victims of domestic and political violence.

A Map of Hope presents diverse women writers who have created a literature of global consciousness and justice. Their works give a face, an image, and a human dimension to the dehumanization of human rights violations. The collection allows readers to hear voices that have decided to make a difference. It goes beyond geography and ethnic groups; writers from around the globe are united by the universal dimensions of horror and deprivation, as well as the unique common struggle for justice and solidarity.

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front cover of A Map of Hope
A Map of Hope
Women's Writing on Human Rights—An International Literary Anthology
Agosín, Marjorie
Rutgers University Press, 1999

The first international anthology to explore women’s human rights from a literary perspective.

More than half a century after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, women throughout the world still struggle for social and political justice. Many fight back with the only tools of resistance they possess—words. A Map of Hope presents a collection of 77 extraordinary literary works documenting the ways women writers have spoken out about human rights issues.

Writers young and old, known and unknown, explore the dimensions of terror, the unspeakable atrocities of war, and the possibilities of resistance and refusal against all odds. Their poems, essays, memoirs, and brief histories examine issues that affect the condition of women in war, prison camps, exile, and as victims of domestic and political violence.

A Map of Hope presents diverse women writers who have created a literature of global consciousness and justice. Their works give a face, an image, and a human dimension to the dehumanization of human rights violations. The collection allows readers to hear voices that have decided to make a difference. It goes beyond geography and ethnic groups; writers from around the globe are united by the universal dimensions of horror and deprivation, as well as the unique common struggle for justice and solidarity.

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A Map of Mexico City Blues
Jack Kerouac as Poet
James T. Jones
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

In this pioneering critical study of Jack Kerouac’s book-length poem, Mexico City Blues—apoetic parallel to the writer’s fictional saga, the Duluoz Legend—James T. Jones uses a rich and flexible neoformalist approach to argue his case for the importance of Kerouac’s rarely studied poem.

After a brief summary of Kerouac’s poetic career, Jones embarks on a thorough reading of Mexico City Blues from several different perspectives: he first focuses on Kerouac’s use of autobiography in the poem and then discusses how Kerouac’s various trips to Mexico, his conversion to Buddhism, his theory of spontaneous poetics, and his attraction to blues and jazz influenced the theme, structure, and sound of Mexico City Blues.
 

Jones’s multidimensional explication suggests the formal and thematic complexity of Kerouac’s long poem and demonstrates the major contribution Mexico City Blues makes to post–World War II American poetry and poetics.
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A Map of Signs and Scents
New and Selected Poems, 1979–2014
Amjad Nasser / Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah and Khaled Mattawa
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Featuring poems from earlier collections of Amjad Nasser’s work and many newer uncollected poems never made available in English, A Map of Signs and Scents introduces the work of an important Arabic poet to a broader contemporary Anglophone readership. This special annotation edition helps readers view the multifaceted contexts within which Nasser has created his award-winning poems.
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A Map of the Lost World
Rick Hilles
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012

The poems that make up A Map of the Lost World range from tightly-wrought shorter lyrics to longer autobiographical narratives to patterns of homage (in several forms) of poets that Hilles admires and emulates (including Richard Hugo, James Wright, James Merrill and Larry Levis) to extended voice-driven meditations, one in the voice of a German Jewish woman, a prisoner who would escape a French concentration camp and go on to fight in the French resistance, to other efforts to confront history and not be devoured by history, and to locate, even resuscitate, friends lost to death, if only provisionally; though each poem in A Map of the Lost World is highly crafted and diversely rendered, in this collection, each poem finds its unifying impulse in it’s maker’s desire to span vast distances to reach loved ones, beloved others, the various families of friends, fueled by an almost gymnastic imagination that vaults itself into almost any space—going to almost any length—sustained by the various forms of love, which, after all, may be as close as any of us has come (in this or any life) to knowing and warming ourselves, if not also at times being scalded by, the immortal fires of the Infinite.

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A Map of the Night
David Wagoner
University of Illinois Press, 2008
David Wagoner’s wide-ranging poetry buzzes and swells with life. Woods, streams, and fields fascinate him--he happily admits his devotion to Thoreau--but so do people and their habits, dear friends and family, the odd poet, and strangers who become even stranger when looked at closely. In this new collection, Wagoner catches the mixed feelings of a long drive, the sensations of walking against a current, the difficulty of writing poetry with noisily amorous neighbors, and many more uniquely familiar experiences.
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New Lines
Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map
Matthew W. Wilson
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

New Lines takes the pulse of a society increasingly drawn to the power of the digital map, examining the conceptual and technical developments of the field of geographic information science as this work is refracted through a pervasive digital culture. Matthew W. Wilson draws together archival research on the birth of the digital map with a reconsideration of the critical turn in mapping and cartographic thought. 

Seeking to bridge a foundational divide within the discipline of geography—between cultural and human geographers and practitioners of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)—Wilson suggests that GIS practitioners may operate within a critical vacuum and may not fully contend with their placement within broader networks, the politics of mapping, the rise of the digital humanities, the activist possibilities of appropriating GIS technologies, and more.

Employing the concept of the drawn and traced line, Wilson treads the theoretical terrain of Deleuze, Guattari, and Gunnar Olsson while grounding their thoughts with the hybrid impulse of the more-than-human thought of Donna Haraway. What results is a series of interventions—fractures in the lines directing everyday life—that provide the reader with an opportunity to consider the renewed urgency of forceful geographic representation. These five fractures are criticality, digitality, movement, attention, and quantification. New Lines examines their traces to find their potential and their necessity in the face of our frenetic digital life.

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Skull Shapes and the Map
Craniometric Analyses in the Dispersion of Modern Homo
William White Howells
Harvard University Press, 1989
In this sequel to his Cranial Variation in Man, William White Howells surveys present-day regional skull shapes by a uniform method, examining the nature and degree of cranial differences discernible between recent Homo sapiens populations around the world.
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