"Theater of the World: The Maps That Made History"

I received Thomas Reinerstsen Berg's fascinating book as a Christmas gift from Lisa and Attilio. Reinerstsen Berg documents, describes, and explains maps from humanity's cave-drawing pre-history through our current digital format in Google Earth. Printed on very high quality paper with many reproductions of maps, "Theater of the World" took me some months to complete. (And I must admit that I only skimmed some of the sections dwelling on the challenges of mapping Reinerstsen Berg's homeland, Norway.)

Some extracts from the end of "Theater of the World" sum up Reinersten Berg's conclusions about his beautiful and extensive project:

Maps are images of the world -- representations of a world [and life] view. Maps ... represent various ways of seeing the world, from [the contours of heaven and earth on the walls of caves to] the speculations of the Ancient Greeks to the religious faith of the Middle Ages; from the scientific [this saeculum only] experimentation and objective mapping of the Renaissance to the collection of enormous volumes of data in today's digital age.

The kicker: "Common to the cartographers of every age throughout history is that the ways in which they choose to present the world say much about what they [and their patrons/customers] consider important -- and the opportunities that their age affords them." In other words, what we see on maps reflects what we believe is most important about the world(s) around us.

So, what do Google Maps reveal about us?

"Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." Google has understood that maps are primarily everyday tools .. and this is exactly why Google is able to provide us with maps for free -- by selling advertising ... 

More than anything else, we are consumers. Maps ignoring heaven, Eden, or the land of Prester John serve to confirm that, for now at least, we still live in a secular age.

"Theater of the World": a book that I recommend.