Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet
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“Crane’s book is quite probably destined to become the standard text.”—Simon Winchester, The New York Times Gerhard Mercator lived in an era of formidable intellectual and scientific advances. At the center of the exploratory vortex were the cartographers who were painstakingly piecing together the evidence to create ever more accurate pictures of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of all of them. His inspiration—the map—solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? His resulting projection revolutionized navigation and has become the most common worldview. For the first time, people were able to see the world on paper and their place in it. Nicholas Crane, a geographer himself, has combined a keen eye for historical detail with a gift for vivid storytelling to produce this masterly and highly acclaimed biography of the man who mapped the planet.
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Wow, this book is amazingly detailed and incredibly thorough, but it is also a bit overwhelming, and hard to read. If anything it contains too much information - making it (for me anyway) too hard to pull together into cohesive knowledge.
It is not necessarily written in an overly academic way - passages of it in isolation are quite readable, but the sheer weight of events and actions, descriptions of maps & globes is just, well, overwhelming. The almost 50 pages of notes referenced from the text do seem to suggest an academic work, but research is obviously something the author excelled at!
As other reviewers have said (quite correctly in my case) that the book is of too much detail to maintain the interest of a general reader. This was the case for me although I found certain parts excellent, overall it was hard to stick with. I read another two and a half books while unmotivated to pick this up off the table.
So although the details of his mapping and globe techniques made sense as I read along, it was all too much for any retained knowledge, although the Epilogue gives a nice summary in several pages.
It seems petty to give this less than 3 stars, but I didn't ‘enjoy' reading it any more than that.
