Denis Wood: Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, Paperback, First Edition by Glass, Ira (Used)

Paperback: First Edition
Used: Very Good
9780979956249
0979956242

Publication Date: 2011-02-28
Publisher: Siglio
Paperback : 112 pages
Edition: First Edition
Author: Glass, Ira
ISBN-10: 0979956242
ISBN-13: 9780979956249

Product Description With artful wit and rigor, the cartographer Denis Wood has written numerous books (including the influential bestseller The Power of Maps) that reorient his readers not only to our neighborhoods, homes and bodies, but also to our own very human instinct to understand where we live by mapmaking. At the heart of Wood's investigations is a near-legendary endeavor: the Boylan Heights maps, begun in 1982, and now published in Everything Sings. Surveying his century-old, half-square mile neighborhood Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina, Wood began by paring away the inessential "map crap" (scale, orientation, street grids) and, in searching for the revelatory in the unmapped and the unmappable, he ended up plotting such phenomena as radio waves permeating the air, the light cast by street lights and Halloween pumpkins on porches. As radio host Ira Glass writes in his introduction to this volume, "we see which homes have wind chimes and which ones call the cops. We see the route of the letter carrier and the life cycle of the daily paper. Wood is writing a novel where we never meet the main characters, but their stuff is everywhere." Together, Wood's maps accumulate into a multi-layered story about one neighborhood that tells the larger story of what constitutes the places we call home. Denis Wood (born 1945) is a geographer, an independent scholar and the author of several books on maps, including the popular and highly influential The Power of Maps (which originated as an exhibition Wood curated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design). His most recent publications include The Natures of Maps (co-authored with John Fels) and Rethinking the Power of Maps (with Fels and John Krygier). Selected maps from Everything Sings have been exhibited internationally such as at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, as well as included in a variety of publications, including Katherine Harmon's You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. Review That a cartographer could set out on a mission that's so emotional, so personal, so idiosyncratic, was news to me. --Ira Glass, from his introduction to Everything Sings Everything Sings is an atlas that is not an atlas: it is a series of stories that, along with Denis Wood s illuminating text, read like a compelling work of fiction. Welcome to the mysterious, mundane, unique, and commonplace world of Boylan Heights, a location fortunate enough to be flattered with the kind of inventive and groundbreaking mapping Wood offers here. --Katherine Harmon, editor of You Are Here: Personal Geographies & Other Maps of the Imagination About the Author The author of the popular and highly influential The Power of Maps, Wood has been a key figure in disseminating the idea that all maps reflect a certain and powerful subjectivity rather than represent an objective reality. The Power of Mapsbegan as Wood's curatorial vision for an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in 1992 and became a book in the same year (the exhibition was remounted the following year at the Smithsonian). Wood has written numerous books that critique, investigate, and, ultimately, reorient his readers not only to the micro-spatial our neighborhoods, homes, and bodies but also to our own very human instinct to understand where we live through making maps. These books include The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World (University of Chicago, 2009) co-authored with John Fels, Rethinking the Power of Maps (Guilford, 2010) with Fels and John Krygier, Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land (Guilford, 2003), and Home Rules (John Hopkins University Press, 1994).