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):
Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo, by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith,
December 11, 2018, University of Chicago Press, ISBN-13: 978-0226540887.
About a millennium ago, in Cairo, an unknown author completed a large and richly illustrated book. In the course of thirty-five chapters, this
book guided the reader on a journey from the outermost cosmos and planets to Earth and its lands, islands, features, and inhabitants. This treatise, known as The Book of Curiosities, was unknown to modern scholars until a remarkable manuscript copy surfaced
in 2000.
Lost Maps of the Caliphs provides the first general overview of The Book of Curiosities and the unique insight it offers into medieval Islamic
thought. Opening with an account of the remarkable discovery of the manuscript and its purchase by the Bodleian Library, the authors use The Book of Curiosities to re-evaluate the development of astrology, geography, and cartography in the first four centuries
of Islam. Their account assesses the transmission of Late Antique geography to the Islamic world, unearths the logic behind abstract maritime diagrams, and considers the palaces and walls that dominate medieval Islamic plans of towns and ports. Early astronomical
maps and drawings demonstrate the medieval understanding of the structure of the cosmos and illustrate the pervasive assumption that almost any visible celestial event had an effect upon life on Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs also reconsiders the history
of global communication networks at the turn of the previous millennium. It shows the Fatimid Empire, and its capital Cairo, as a global maritime power, with tentacles spanning from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and the East African coast.
As Lost Maps of the Caliphs makes clear, not only is The Book of Curiosities one of the greatest achievements of medieval mapmaking, it is also
a remarkable contribution to the story of Islamic civilization that opens an unexpected window to the medieval Islamic view of the world.
Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe, by Steven Seegel, June 29, 2018, University of Chicago Press,
ISBN-13: 978-0226438498.
More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships
that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution.
As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas
behind these influential maps.
Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel re-creates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and
influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and
addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons East Central Europe became the fault line of these world-changing developments.
At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical
origins of how the region was defined—and the key people who helped define it.
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
Jerry Crail Johnson Earth Sciences & Map Library
Sciences Department, University Libraries
University of Colorado Boulder
184 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309
303-492-4487