Atlas of the World
The Atlas of the World provides a current update of the planet, its people, countries and weather conditions.
This is awesome!
This is totally as described. It's a big huge book filled with maps! Who doesn't love maps? Big jerkfaces.
Don't be a jerkface. This atlas is awesome. It has lots of topical maps and city maps and region maps and a big map for your wall.
Unlimited Geography
This product hides its outstanding value in an innocuous title. This is far more than just an Atlas! The collection of information is truly astounding. Add to that the sattelite views of differing earth locations and the comprehensive maps and political history and you have an encyclopedia of the world second to none!
Well done!
I haven't bought a new one in years. This has amazing detail and information. Glad I purchased this one. The whole office has been using it.
I'm torn between this one and its junior brother
This is certainly a beautiful volume, and I bought it solely for its price: I had paid $40+ for its junior brother a few years ago in the bookstore, so why not upgrade for free, as it were? The maps are lovely, and the front matter is largely helpful--I say largely. For one thing, the city "maps" are all but useless: one is hard-pressed to find a street identified by a name rather than by a generic route number (viz., within a national highway system); arbitrary pieces of cities are selected for presentation; and one finds suburb A peculiarly mislabeled as suburb B, or a leg of freeway C misidentified as freeway D. Then, there's the overall size of the work. Not that this is anywhere near as large or heavy as the London Times atlas--a work for which it is, quite literally, an ordeal to look up a city in the voluminous index and then hunt for it with a magnifying lens on the proper square of the proper page--but it's still awfully large. Given that large size, you'd think the publisher could do a better job of presenting the world's time zones. (Mind you, its "junior brother" didn't show time zones at all, but this atlas is scarcely better, offering a sketchy, fraction-of-a-page map that's all but useless given the numerous +00:15 and such quirks of the world's time zone allotments.)
All those criticisms having been leveled, the maps are glorious. Truthfully, I haven't seen nicer ones anywhere--even in, yes, the London Times atlas, which has been the standard-bearer for eons (though I guess its staff would refer to them as aeons). The colors are a delight to the eye, providing the perfect balance of legibility and topographic cues: you can actually see, e.g., Tibet straining upward off the page, reaching for the sky. Also, this atlas contains some vital maps that its junior sibling lacks: important among these are close-ups of central Honshu, Korea, the U.K., and so forth. Surprising omissions include better detail of Israel and Turkey: come to think of it, anywhere the borders are of intricate fractal dimension--say, Greece, Maryland, Denmark--a better job could have been done. I'd also like to see flags, let alone clear and more consistent indication of sub-national borders, be they of oblasts, denes, pradeshes, estados, etc. But let's look at the overall equation: for under $50, you get gorgeous maps; a plethora of very useful charts; mellifluous essays that don't hurt; lovely satellite photos that are, again, entirely harmless; and even a handy wall map to keep your kid brother occupied until his new Mega Space Zork Wars arrives in the mail.
(61 reviews)
