The Penguin historical atlas of North America Book

I just finished reading this book. Some of the reviews have praised the book as 'accessible' and 'a pleasure to read.' For me, it was a real struggle, as I found the language impenetrable and the history difficult to assimilate. I suppose it's partly my own fault--when I began the book I expected and wanted a book focusing on the astronomical history of the moon, but that's not what it is. Astronomy is part of the book, of course, but even as the telescope begins to play a major part, the fact is that this is a cultural history of how mankind has come to understand the moon over the centuries.

Interestingly, one of my takeaways from the book is how societies accumulated knowledge before the advent of moveable type. European history tended to lean more toward the textual, while the Middle East leaned toward the visual. That's probably why such a great scientist of the Middle East as Alhazen (aka al-Haytham) is little known in the West. I was left with the impression that the mass production of printed matter came at the expense of other mediums, especially the visual.

The core of the book describes the work of men who made pioneering observations of the moon, and why their lunar art was significant in moving our knowledge forward. But here is where the textual medium eventually broke down. Although the book is filled with illustrations, the book doesn't show all the works described (possibly for reasons beyond the author's control), and none are in color. A number of key artworks are not available in the book, so readers are on their own to find these works and compare them with the author's descriptions.

Imagine you've never seen the Mona Lisa, and the only way you can experience it is through someone else's written description. The writing may be fulfilling in some ways, but without that visual representation, you'll never reach that eureka moment when the two mediums merge and the mind makes sense of it. That's analogous to the author's problem here.

So I think it's ironic--and unfortunate--that the book makes much of the difference between the textual and the visual, but isn't able to balance the two in a really meaningful way.

Ultimately, I think the crux of the book's problem is that it's a textbook, when it should be an art book. I think the text should supplement the art in this case, rather than the other way around. While I got a lot out of the book, I wish I could have learned a lot more.