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Title: The Island of Lost Maps : A True Story of Cartographic Crime by MILES HARVEY ISBN: 0-7679-0826-0 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 04 September, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.88 (64 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: An Overall Boring book with some interesting parts
Comment: As a map afficianado, I was thrilled when I first purchased this book. By page 50 or so, I was still thrilled to learn about a heinous map crime and some background of the history of maps and their importance in societies. From there the book largely fails as Harvey attempts to write a long book about a map theft and the thief, which is mostly a non-story. Harvey goes to great lengths to undercover the past of the map thief, Gilbert Bland, but there is nothing there. So instead of being told that he could not find any interesting things about this "Bland" man, we are subjected to pages and pages of how Harvey's attempts to discover Bland's past and his failures to do so. Mixed in with that narration are attempts by Harvey to draw innane comparisons with this case and historical events and figures, comparisons which are really unrealistic and a bit too much to handle. There is not much of a story to tell with this map crime. Instead, Harvey rambles on forever about how there doesn't seem to be much of a story and tries to provide rediculous rationale and analysis of just another crime.
Don't waste your time, I wish I didn't. Needless to say, I want those few hours of my life back.
Rating: 2
Summary: Island of content in an ocean of padding.
Comment: 2 and a half stars.
Here is a diverting magazine article - maybe a few pages - blown out into a pretty average book. You can see where this journalist would have thought he was onto something - the basic story of the sheer volume of valuable maps stolen by one guy is interesting. Moreover not many of us know about the ins and out of the map trade, and obviously many of the first maps of an area have a story behind them. It's like someone who's put a fair bit of work into their honours thesis and thinks, "Hey, I reckon I could just push this a bit further and pull out a Ph.D."
This is where a good supervisor/editor could have stepped in and reintroduced some reality: "Mate, that'd be an excellent story, but you'll never spin it out into a whole book."
Harvey could have pushed his case. This is potentially interesting stuff, and he's a decent enough writer: the style is palatable and carries you along ... BUT, dammit, we need some better content. The book hinged hugely on whether or not his central figure was interesting enough. Gilbert Bland, however, was not only essentially unremarkable - he wasn't even available to be interviewed! At this point Harvey should have admitted defeat, cut his losses and got onto something else . Instead we get chapters of absurd padding - interviews with wildly speculating psychologists - none of whom have exchanged two words with their subject - about the unconscious motivations of collectors and thieves. Was it his difficult family background? Trauma from his years in Vietnam? Joke is after all this even Harvey himself comes up with the earth-shattering theory that Bland stole the maps because they were worth money and he was greedy.
Well, stone me - who would have thought it?
Even if Harvey had have managed to get the interview he constantly begged Bland to grant, it's dubious whether Bland would have had much interesting to say. He was a dishonest guy who stole things - it could have been computers or hardware - the only reason he was even worth an article was that he stole rare maps.
Sure, there is some engaging material in relating some of the ripping yarns of the original cartographers. But this is wholly undermined by Harvey's at times excruciatingly contrived attempts to parallel them to his own 'quests' and 'discoveries' in his search for the material to make a decent book. You'll get something like, "Magellan had to navigate his way right around the globe ... just like I was navigating my way around the globe of Bland's life," - and he'll spin this sort of spurious metaphor out for pages, investing it with some absurd synchronistic spiritual significance. While the rest of the book is mildly diverting if taken in small doses, his attempts to make some sort of powerful coherence by poring over his journey in creating the book are, well, bad. They make bad reading, they make you groan and roll your eyes.
In a sense, though, I suppose, good luck to him. He has turned all the work he'd invested in a nice idea that didn't pan out (through no fault of his own) into a completed (and successful) book. Not a bad trick given the ultimate paucity of his material. Better for him than just throwing it into the bin once he realised he wasn't going to get the interview with Bland, and the book was never going to be really good. Like a researcher whose tests didn't result in the cataclysmic results he'd hoped for, he's professionally written up and published the results anyway rather than just shrivel up. However, from the reader's perspective there are plenty of other books out there where the results did come up - where the central figures ARE fascinating. The Island of Lost Maps won't hurt you, but there are better stories to spend your time on - ones that (unlike me with this one) you won't find yourself putting aside two thirds of the way through. Let me suggest, for example, William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1998) - where the author, similarly, follows a hunch that there's a book in an interest of his, but much more successfully pulls off the mix of striking history, personal experience and novel contemporary characters.
Rating: 2
Summary: About as Bland as a Local Road Map
Comment: I must agree with many of the reviews posted here already. This book was a little hard to slough through as it is not so much a journey as a random wandering. In claiming to tell the story of a notorious map thief (whom, the author admits very early on, wouldn't even give him an interview for this work), the book bumps around, pinball fashion, talking about history, cartography, librarians and whatever else seemed to be on the author's mind at the moment. An outline may have helped. Focusing on presenting the material in an orderly fashion may have helped. Cutting about 100 pages may have helped immensly. Sticking to a the main theme of the work may have been of great benefit to the reader (other than the "how he got caught" story, the profile of Bland doesn't begin until almost 200 pages into the work). This isn't a bad book. It just suffers from lack of focus and can be very frusterating reading at times. If you are interested in cartography, maybe give this a try. If you are a casual observer interested in Bland's crimes, good luck finding the well hidden pertinant material. This book just seemed to bear too much of a resemblence to a college thesis with too shallow a premise that had to be padded to fill the required pages.
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Title: The Map That Changed the World : William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0060931809 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Antique Maps by Carl Moreland ISBN: 0714829544 Publisher: Phaidon Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1994 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Maryland State Archives Atlas of Historical Maps of Maryland, 1608-1908 by Edward C. Papenfuse, Joseph M. III Coale ISBN: 0801872359 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Pub. Date: 25 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $69.95 |
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Title: The Story of Maps by Lloyd Arnold Brown ISBN: 0486238733 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 June, 1979 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict by John Baxter ISBN: 0312317255 Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books Pub. Date: 11 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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