Mazes Around the World

Mazes can be a lot of fun. We're not talking about the little handheld toy mazes you can sometimes buy in a store or the type of maze that a mouse runs through, but rather the large, unusual mazes that have cropped up though time. Perhaps you've even had a chance to go through a corn maze or sunflower maze and got totally lost. Hopefully you found this experience to be fun and not upsetting! In this book you will read about many different historical mazes and labyrinths. Many years ago these two terms meant the "same thing," but now the author claims that "today a labyrinth is often thought of as a maze with a single path to the center, while a maze has many false turns and dead ends." You will learn about a massive maze called the Egyptian Labyrinth, the Minotaur's Maze in Greece, religious labyrinths (Algeria, France and San Francisco), stone mazes in Sweden that had many reasons for existing (superstition not excluded!), turf mazes in the United Kingdom called Caerdroia, hedge mazes in the United Kingdom (one is a whopping 2,771 acres!), water mazes in the United Kingdom and in France, the woven Mazes of the North American Native American basket weavers, the maize mazes of North America and the Soekershof mazes of South Africa. This unusual book about mazes will fascinate the casual reader and may spark an interest in further research in others. A simple article read during a plane flight spurred the author on in her quest to find out more. In the front of the book is a simple map showing where the mazes described in the book are located. Each maze is concisely described on a single page and followed by a captivating depiction of the area that shows where the maze may be located or depicts part of a maze itself. In the back of the book there is a translation page for the words maze and labyrinth, two mazes (tricky, tricky!), a bibliography and an index. After you read this book and get the maze bug, you can always look into the Corn Maze Directory online and find a maze near you!