The Power of Maps

I read Wood's The Power of Maps a few years ago, and I've just come back to it. It is not light reading (although it's well written and a pleasure to read), and it isn't just about cartography. It is about the ways in which we use symbols to reflect our world's biases, power structures, hopes, fears and more. Maps are forms of cultural language, and Wood does not shrink from pulling the curtain away from the fact that they are also often arbitrary, manipulative, and simply wrong. At the same time, he celebrates them, and he encourages readers to come to maps with their critical antennae raised. So, maps can tell us much more about our world than most people realize. This is real scholarship, and it is intellectually rigorous, but it is also accessible, relevant and rich in content. It's a wonderful book.

This is one of those books that come around all too infrequently that make us see the world differently. Those content with a limited view may not fully appreciate the depth of this book's insights. The prose simply soars beyond what one would expect from an academic subject...which makes it thrilling to read. Denis Wood's are not for the lazy or the closed-minded. They are, indeed, masterful.

If you want the history of cartography or an explanation of its technicalities, this is not the book for you. If you want to see more clearly the human landscape in which maps are embedded and the human activities for which maps are constructed, this IS the book for you! Brilliant and fun and informative reading for cartographers and laymen. Denis Wood shows how maps represent societies as much as topographies. Grab your topo for rafting trip through time and place!

If you want to know what you can do with maps and what their creators are able to do with them, read this. It's an important book for anyone interested in the history of maps or in the ways we make political and social decisions on the basis of mapped information today. Yes, Wood does build a complex analytical structure for deciphering maps, but they are intricate objects and dense with information. This is an excellent source for anyone with a serious interest in the subject.

Ranging from strident politics to Eco-like semiotics, this book considers the map in all its forms, intents and uses. The text is a little too preachy for much of the book, but the quality of some of the ideas and the enthusiam with which Wood presents them makes this bearable. Wood's basic point is that maps are human constructs that come with points of view. As such, questions about the qualities of a map can't be answered without also asking what the map was constructed for. With examples ranging from the Peters Projection controversies, to election gerrymandering, to natural resource utilization, he shows how all maps are designed to both include and to exclude, and how they embody a representation of the world in the best tradition of Eco's "signs". A great book, slightly marred by the writing style.