Hi All-



I'm the Review Editor for the "Atlas and Book Review" section of the WAML Information Bulletin. I'm seeking reviewers for the following two books (descriptions for these books are taken from Amazon):


The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World, by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, University of Chicago Press, October 2017, ISBN-13: 978-0226389578.
Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, its legacy and the accompanying Russian-American tension continues to loom large.  Russia's access to detailed information on the United States and its allies may not seem so shocking in this day of data clouds and leaks, but long before we had satellite imagery of any neighborhood at a finger's reach, the amount the Soviet government knew about your family's city, street, and even your home would astonish you. Revealing how this was possible, The Red Atlas is the never-before-told story of the most comprehensive mapping endeavor in history and the surprising maps that resulted.

From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, and London to towns like Pontiac, MI and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories and ports, or more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet feet on the ground. The Red Atlas  includes over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.

Remapping Modern Germany after National Socialism, 1945-1961 (Syracuse Studies in Geography), by Matthew D. Mingus, Syracuse University Press, October 2017, ISBN-13: 978-0815635383.
Located in the often-contentious center of the European continent, German territory has regularly served as a primary tool through which to understand and study Germany's economic, cultural, and political development. Many German geographers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became deeply invested in geopolitical determinism―the idea that a nation's territorial holdings (or losses) dictate every other aspect of its existence. Taking this as his premise, Mingus focuses on the use of maps as mediums through which the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union sought to reshape German national identity after the Second World War. As important as maps and the study of geography have been to the field of European history, few scholars have looked at the postwar development of occupied Germany through the lens of the map―the most effective means to orient German citizens ontologically within a clearly and purposefully delineated spatial framework. Mingus traces the institutions and individuals involved in the massive cartographic overhaul of postwar Germany. In doing so, he explores not only the causes and methods behind the production and reproduction of Germany's mapped space but also the very real consequences of this practice.


Deadline will be the last week of June for these reviews. (I will send you more specifics if wind up reviewing one of these books). Please contact me off-list if you're interested and I'll send you the book, the reviewer guidelines, and a due date.

Thanks-

Ilene

Ilene Raynes
Map Library Program Manager
Jerry Crail Johnson Earth Sciences & Map Library
Sciences Department, University Libraries
University of Colorado Boulder
184 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309
303-492-4487
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