Very slow-moving, but informative.
A biography of the only mapmaker nonspecialists are likely to have heard of.
Mercator (1512–94) was born in Flanders as Gerard de Cremer, Latinizing his name, as did many learned men of his day. British historian Taylor (God's Fugitive, 1999) begins with a summary of the state of geography in the early 16th century, built, as it was, on such ancient authorities as Ptolemy but incorporating recent discoveries in the Americas and Asia. Mercator, he believes, was drawn to geography and cartography as disciplines that combined classical knowledge with the heady news being brought by returning adventurers to port cities all over Europe. At the same time, a good mapmaker could make a great deal of money by supplying the rich and powerful with accurate maps and globes. In Mercator’s case, even at the apprentice stage of his career, his craftsmanship set him apart. By age 30, he was doing commissions for clients ranging from Spain’s Charles V to the Turkish Sultan: maps of England, Lorraine, and Europe; atlases; and matched pairs of terrestrial and celestial globes. For all, he drew on the most current information he could gather, whether Copernicus’s sky maps or documents from the recent English Arctic expeditions. His careful courtship of the powerful stood him in good stead even when, in 1543, for reasons Taylor can only speculate on, he fell afoul of the Inquisition. On his release, he moved to Duisberg, in Cleves, where for the rest of his life he managed to avoid the bitter religious conflicts sweeping Europe. In 1569, he produced his masterpiece: a large (53 x 84 inches) world map based on the cylindrical projection that has become permanently associated with his name. Taylor methodically fills in the details both of Mercator’s career and its historical context, and he concludes by arguing that Mercator was, on the whole, a true scientist despite the limitations his era imposed on him.
Very slow-moving, but informative.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8027-1377-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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