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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