Best of
Maps

2013

Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas


Rebecca Solnit - 2013
    More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city's remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthors' compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.The innovative maps' precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced. Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city--by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level rise--and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place.Read an excerpt here: Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker by University of California PressListen to an interview with the authors here:http://www.ucpress.edu/blog/16097/new...

A Map of the World According to Illustrators and Storytellers


Antonis Antoniou - 2013
    This book features the most original and sought-after map illustrators whose work is in line with the zeitgeist. Drawing a map means understanding our world a bit better. For centuries, we have used the tools of cartography to represent both our immediate surroundings and the world at large--and to convey them to others. On the one hand, maps are used to illustrate areal relationships, including distances, dimensions, and topographies. On the other, maps can also serve as projection screens for a variety of display formats, such as illustration, data visualization, and visual storytelling. In our age of satellite navigation systems and Google Maps, personal interpretations of the world around us are becoming more relevant. Publications, the tourism industry, and other commercial parties are using these contemporary, personal maps to showcase specific regions, to characterize local scenes, to generate moods, and to tell stories beyond sheer navigation. A new generation of designers, illustrators, and mapmakers are currently discovering their passion for various forms of illustrative cartography. A Map of the World is a compelling collection of their work--from accurate and surprisingly detailed representations to personal, naive, and modernistic interpretations. The featured projects from around the world range from maps and atlases inspired by classic forms to cartographic experiments and editorial illustrations.

Gettysburg: The Story of the Battle with Maps


Stackpole Books - 2013
    70 color maps and insightful text tell the hour-by-hour story of the 3-day Battle of Gettysburg.

Vanity of Small Differences


Grayson Perry - 2013
    This book is an essential companion to one of the key contemporary art works of the last decade.

Catholic Dictionary: An Abridged and Updated Edition of Modern Catholic Dictionary


John A. Hardon - 2013
    Now revised to include the statements of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, new movements and devotions, and other recent developments within Catholicism, this edition brings the legacy of Father Hardon into the contemporary era. A worthy companion to Catechism of the Catholic Church and Scott Hahn's Catholic Bible Dictionary, this book is an essential resource for the Catholic reader.

The New Stokes Field Guide to Birds: Western Region


Donald Stokes - 2013
    This easy-to-use guide features 636 North American bird species and more than 2,000 stunning color photographs. And yet it's portable enough to fit in your pocket! The guide includes: The newest scientific and common names and phylogenetic order special help for identifying birds in flight through important clues of behavior, plumage, and shape detailed descriptions of songs and calls important behavioral information and key habitat preferences The newest range maps, detailing species' winter, summer, year-round ranges, and migration routes. Whether you are a novice or experienced birder, this new Stokes guide will take your birding to the next level.

The Arachnean and Other Texts


Fernand Deligny - 2013
    In 1968 Deligny established a “network” for informally taking care of children with autism that was more than a mere site of living: it was a milieu created out of a reflection on the mode of being autistic. What is a space perceived outside of language? What is the form of a movement without perspective or goal? How do we engage with a world that is not our own, a world turned upside down yet truly common, where acting cohabitates with our actions and the unknown with our forms of knowledge? Such is the mythical web of the “Arachnean,” made of lines, holes, traces, enigmas, and questions without answers that demand to see that which cannot be seen. Long before the digital age of social networks, meshworks, and digital webs, Fernand Deligny speaks to us in his own autobiographical and aphoristic manner. For Deligny, his life was always experienced in the form of “the network as a mode of being.”

Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers


Karen O'Rourke - 2013
    Today, the convergence of global networks, online databases, and new tools for mobile mapping coincides with a resurgence of interest in walking as an art form. In Walking and Mapping, Karen O'Rourke explores a series of walking/mapping projects by contemporary artists. She offers close readings of these projects--many of which she was able to experience firsthand--and situates them in relation to landmark works from the past half-century. Together, they form a new entity, a dynamic whole greater than the sum of its parts. By alternating close study of selected projects with a broader view of their place in a bigger picture, Walking and Mapping itself maps a complex phenomenon.

Mapping the Roads: Building Modern Britain


Mike Parker - 2013
    And the car, more than any other single factor, has shaped our landscape and changed our maps. Busy, bustling, often creaking at the seams, most of us have a love-hate relationship with our roads. Like it or not, our modern lifestyles depend on them—not only for getting from A to B, but for the distribution of almost everything we buy. Yet once upon a time, the building of roads was seen as a glorious and heroic enterprise. Britain's motorways—"the cathedrals of the modern world"—are the ultimate expression of our modern age. From the old ways to the motorways, Mapping the Roads charts the ambitions and hopes of the nation through our maps.

Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance


Cheryl Janifer LaRoche - 2013
    Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, Cheryl LaRoche focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. This study foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. LaRoche demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the "geography of resistance" tells the new powerful and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.

Web Cartography: Map Design for Interactive and Mobile Devices


Ian Muehlenhaus - 2013
    Technology is but one facet of web map creation, however. Map design, aesthetics, and user-interactivity are equally important for effective map communication. From interactivity to graphical user interface design, from symbolization choices to animation, and from layout to typeface and color selection, Web Cartography offers the first comprehensive overview and guide for designing beautiful and effective web maps for a variety of devices.Written for those with a basic understanding of mapmaking, but who may not have an in-depth knowledge of web design, this book explains how to create effective interaction, animation, and layouts for maps in online and mobile platforms. Concept-driven, this reference emphasizes cartographic principles for web and mobile map design over specific software techniques. It focuses on key design concepts that will remain true regardless of software technologies used. The book is supplemented with a website providing links to stellar web maps, video tutorials and lectures, do-it-yourself labs, map critique exercises, and links to others' tutorials.Approachable, clear, and concise, the book provides a nontechnical, approachable guide to map design for the web. It provides best practices for map communication, based on spatial data visualization and graphic design theory. By carefully avoiding overly technical jargon, it provides a solid launching pad from which students, practitioners, and innovators can begin to design aesthetically pleasing and intuitive web maps.

Through the Balustrade


M.B. Dahl - 2013
    They tell people which village to live in, they raise children in underground facilities, and they modify anyone who's different. Roxan is different. She's seventeen turns old now, but she was modified when she was a young child. Driven by her questions about what was done to her-and why-she ventures into the forbidden woods beyond the village and discovers a group of Outcasts, led by a strange boy named Altrist. Altrist thinks Roxan's the answer they've been hoping for, the one who can help them escape through the Balustrade-the great wall that surrounds their world. The Outcasts aren't the only ones who think Roxan can help them, though. Hyperion's guards are after her too. They think she's the perfect bait to lead them to conquering Hyperion's adversary. Lost and confused, Roxan feels like her world is totally messed up and broken. Only when she confronts her defeat does she discover freedom and hope, forgiveness and love.

50 Walks in Lake District


A.A. Publishing - 2013
    The book features all of the practical detail you need, accompanied by fascinating background reading on the history and wildlife of the Lake District, and clear mapping for ease of use. Every route has been color-coded according to difficulty, and walks are annotated with local points of interest and places to stop for refreshments. Every walk is given a summary of distance, time, gradient, level of difficulty, type of surface, and access, landscape, dog friendliness, parking, and public toilets.