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):

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.

No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics, by Ruben Andersson, University of California Press, April 2, 2019, ISBN-13: 978-0520294608.

War-torn deserts, jihadist killings, trucks weighted down with contraband and migrants—from the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to the Sahara, images of danger depict a new world disorder on the global margins. With vivid detail, Ruben Andersson traverses this terrain to provide a startling new understanding of what is happening in remote “danger zones.” Instead of buying into apocalyptic visions, Andersson takes aim at how Western states and international organizations conduct military, aid, and border interventions in a dangerously myopic fashion, further disconnecting the world’s rich and poor. Using drones, proxy forces, border reinforcement, and outsourced aid, risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world into zones of insecurity and danger. The result is a vision of chaos crashing into fortified borders, with national and global politics riven by fear. Andersson contends that we must reconnect and snap out of this dangerous spiral, which affects us whether we live in Texas or Timbuktu. Only by developing a new cartography of hope can we move beyond the political geography of fear that haunts us.

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

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