"Denis Wood's book The Power of Maps sheds a brilliant new light on our customary experience of maps....You
will never look at any map the same way again."
--The Christian Science Monitor
"....The last word on maps."
--The Trenton Times
"He has some important, indeed compelling, things to say about maps...Wood not only incor porates a great
store of historical detail into his essays, he sees maps as peculiar historical texts, as repositories of layers
of knowledge and labor that can be revealed if we know how to "read" them....I highly recommend this
unconventional book to historians of science of any period."
--Isis
"If compelled to cite only a single book on cartography to stock a desert-island shelf or to assign to the
eager novice, this is the automatic choice....Although I have been drawing and poring over maps, as well as reading
about them, since childhood, I received more revelations about their essential nature and larger meanings from
this one powerful, disturbing, totally convincing essay than from all the other books, articles, and lectures on
the subject I have ever encountered."
--Wilbur Zelinsky, The Pennsylvania State University
Guilford Publications Web Site, January, 2001
Summary
This volume ventures into terrain where even the most sophisticated map fails to lead--through the mapmaker's
bias. Denis Wood shows how maps are not impartial reference objects, but rather instruments of communication, persuasion,
and power. Like paintings, they express a point of view. By connecting us to a reality that could not exist in
the absence of maps--a world of property lines and voting rights, taxation districts and enterprise zones--they
embody and project the interests of their creators. Sampling the scope of maps available today, illustrations include
Peter Gould's AIDS map, Tom Van Sant's map of the earth, U.S. Geological Survey maps, and a child's drawing of
the world. The Power of Maps was initially published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Museum,
the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design. The New York Times called The Power of Maps exhibition
"an ambitious attempt to examine maps as powerful tools for making statements about the world."
