May 6, 2024
Despite detailed, documentary-style illustrations by Tavares (Hoops) and eloquent prose by Robbins (The Fastest
Drummer), this work offers a spotty account of how landscape-related knowledge came to be represented visually and at scale. Beginning in prehistory, the creators imagine a family recording the valley landscape they see from an enclosed rock ledge: “Mother drew dots on a cave wall. Father etched grooves into a mammoth tusk.” The survey next jumps to ancient Greeks’ speculations about Earth’s shape (positing it as rectangular, disklike, cylindrical, or spherical), then notes how “Native Americans created maps with rocks,” Egyptians painted on papyrus, Chinese mapmakers utilized wood, and Polynesians used shells and sticks. When covering how, “much later, European explorers traveled by land and sea to chart our planet... and proved that it was round,” the text elides matters of colonialism, instead focusing on refinements of accuracy and detail. Spreads return several times to the original valley landscape, which slowly becomes covered with buildings while surveyors stand in the foreground. Though several instruments are named (a compass, a Gunter’s chain, a theodolite), their workings are not explained; back matter instead examines instruments used by contemporary surveyors and cartographers. Human figures are portrayed with various skin tones. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Marietta Zacker, Gallt & Zacker Literary. Illustrator’s agent: Rosemary Stimola, Stimola Literary.
June 1, 2024
A quick overview of the history of maps and of mapmakers' tools from stone chisels to GPS satellites. Less a factual history than a meditation on our innate need to record where the woods end and where streams or trails go, this survey begins with a prehistoric couple daubing marks on a cave wall and carving lines into a mammoth tusk, then zips in a vaguely chronological way around the world and to the present. Robbins delivers nods to old styles of maps from North America, Polynesia, China, Egypt, and Babylonia before ending with modern surveyors and a view of our planet from orbit. The author frames his terse commentary in broad, impersonal generalities (not always accurate ones: The world was probably "proved" to be round long before European explorers made their journeys), leaving it to the closing timeline to sprinkle specific names and dates next to a highly select set of historical artifacts and highlights. Conversely, Tavares focuses on the human element in his illustrations, depicting one figure in Renaissance clothing delightedly peering through a theodolite and elsewhere an individually drawn, racially diverse cast directly creating or using maps in various locales and successive eras. Along with this disconnect between the visual and textual approaches, huge swathes of topical territory go unexamined, from techniques of undersea mapping to basics such as map projections and common symbols. A superficial, less-than-informative sketch. (author's and illustrator's notes, more information on mapmaking, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 7-9)
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June 1, 2024
Grades K-3 Map lovers and readers interested in the development of knowledge and technology will be drawn to Robbins' look at how we, over millennia, have documented Earth's shape. A prehistoric family looks down on a valley, wondering where the rivers go, the trails lead, and the woods end. They draw protomaps on cave walls or in the sand. Much later, Robbins notes, mapmakers moved from depicting locales to wondering about the whole world, and readers will enjoy the speculation, rendered in soft, computer-generated blue, green, and sepia-toned images of the maybes: a rectangular world, a cylinder, a flat disk with monsters around the edges. More recognizable tools make their way into cartographers' arsenals, until Victorians, and then today's surveyors, are shown, each looking over the same valley once contemplated by the prehistoric family. For classrooms, a child's atlas will be a great accompaniment to this; it can also be used in makerspaces where mapmaking is offered. Closing notes on the instruments used in mapmaking and related subject areas are helpful. A worthwhile additional purchase.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.