----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sometimes being a reader and a map librarian come together. "The English Patient" has an interesting map theme. The archeologists are mapping the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the protagonist trades a map for an airplane to rescue his lover. I loved the book and liked the movie. The opening scene of aerial views of the desert is breath-taking. There is a scene in the movie where the lead character is interviewing a local Bedouin about placenames. The Bedouin describes a hill shaped like a reclining woman's hip. The next scene they have found the hill and a cave with pre-historic rock pictures. The next scene has them leaving the hills and one of the trucks tumbles off a road to the bottom of a dune. Last Spring I was going through a set of maps from a long past LC summer project and came across the particular map sheet that must have tickled Michael Ondaatje's muse. It has all of the elements of the scenes in the movie. I scanned the sheet and added it to the MAGIC site, just as I hung the map sheet up on a bulletin board. Take a look at http://magic.lib.uconn.edu/http/Exhibits/EnglishPatient/Exhibit_english.html I haven't gone back to the book to see how it works there. Other good map literature is the Hornblower series and I remember reading Gunter Grass' "Flounder" when I worked at LC and had access to various maps of Danzig/Gdansk through time. Patrick