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Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 16:51:25 -0400
From: Kathleen Weessies <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: More Reviews
Sender: Kathleen Weessies <[log in to unmask]>

Regardless of its critical reception, I think it is a must-read because it
brings maps to the public eye.  This book will help shape public perception
of  Book reviewers aren't all in love with it though. Read on.

>From Time Magazine, Oct 2, 2000, pg. 95.
INVITATIONS TO TURN magazine articles into books usually prove irresistible,
and small wonder. There is the permanence and prestige offered by hard
covers, plus the allure of getting paid again for work already finished.
Most tempting of all, though, is the promise of more pages on which to tell
a story. All magazine writers chafe at the space limitations imposed on them
by parsimonious editors.

Miles Harvey's The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime
(Random House; 405 pages; $24.95) is the fleshed-out version of an article
Harvey published in Outside magazine in June 1997. His topic then was a man
named Gilbert Bland who had made a career in crime out of visiting major
U.S. libraries and cutting maps out of valuable old books in order to sell
these stolen treasures to unscrupulous collectors. Harvey's topic now has
expanded to include accounts of how he researched and wrote both the
original magazine piece and the subsequent book.

The result is a leisurely, meandering journey from which the map-thief
disappears for long, long stretches. Instead, Harvey relates his own
fascination with cartography and reveals that as a child, he had an
uncommonly keen sense of direction. Famous mapmakers of the past are
resurrected and given thumbnail biographies. The sequential digressions are
occasionally diverting, but some readers, trying to maintain a grip on the
story's thread, may conclude, alas, that magazine editors serve a purpose.
-By Paul Gray


>From Newsweek, Sep 18, 2000, p. 85:
GILBERT BLAND STOLE MAPS, ALL OF them rare, some more than 400 years old,
and boy, was he good at it. He wasn't tricky.  That was his genius. For
three or fouryears, until he got caught in 1995, he just walked into
rare-book rooms around the country, took out his razor blade and sliced what
he wanted out of book after book. By the time he was arrested, he had stolen
at least 250 maps worth roughly $500,000.

This story has all the makings of a good if offbeat true-crime saga.
Unfortunately, author Miles Harvey wants it to be much more. So he clogs up
his narrative with everything he knows about cartography, then muddies
things even more with a lot of secondhand psychologizing about boys from
broken homes who might grow up to become map thieves. The sad result is a
book about maps by a writer with no sense of direction.


Kathleen Weessies
Maps/GIS Librarian
Library 100
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI  48823
517-432-9669
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