Reviews for The White Mountains, NH (Making of America Series)

The average rating for The White Mountains, NH (Making of America Series) based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-27 00:00:00 Lasse Mogensen Maps have fascinated me since childhood. Now that my travel distances have shortened, I enjoy reading of places I have visited or places I missed near my travels. The 232 pages of this book answer many questions, but also add other ideas I had not thought of. For example, as a child I knew that the jigsaw piece for Maryland had a very narrow connector between two parts. October, 1765, was the end of a work year and the end point of instructions that Mason had received from those who hired him. He blazed a tree at a definite location to continue their next year's work, if commissioned. But, looking west from a mountain, he was concerned that they might have to cross the Potomac twice, entering Virginia, thereby slicing Maryland. Fortunately, the line, as surveyed the next spring, passed less than two miles north of the Potomac at Hancock, Maryland, where I-70 now drops from Pennsylvania into Maryland on its way towards Baltimore. One July day we attended a baseball game in Cleveland Stadium, the next day traveled I-70 into Maryland, saw another game Camden Yards. --- I found the description of the surveying instruments enticing, that is, causing me to attempt learning more about how those tools are used. --- I enjoyed the way the author interwove historical events with the work of Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-30 00:00:00 Ramiro Luna Great book on how the Mason-Dixon line was actually surveyed, which is actually a pretty exciting story. Unfortunately, Danson has to explain the technical details behind the achievement, which many other readers found difficult to follow. (If you're not good at math, especially geometry, I can see that happening. The calculations and explanations aren't particularly daunting within the text because the appendices provide most of the detail, but just hearing about triangulation and taking a tangent is enough to scare off some readers.) So, if you're looking for more of a social history or an adventure, this isn't the book for you. (Frequent mention of the grueling cold nights lying on the ground just to calibrate the astronomical equipment reminds you just how hard the life of a scientist used to be.) But if you're curious about how Mason and Dixon determined the Pennsylvania-Maryland border (the actual nitty-gritty of surveying) and measured 1 degree of latitude with a high confidence interval for their era, than this is the book for you.