The Shape of Things: How Mapmakers Picture Our World

by Dean Robbins, Matt Tavares (Illustrator)

Overview

How did the first people explore the land they lived on? How did civilizations expand their boundaries and chart courses into new lands? Learn about the history of cartography across cultures in this ode to mapmaking through the ages.

Join history's first mapmakers as they explore the wonders of the world! In these pages, you’ll find the tools ancient people used to depict their surroundings, methods different cartographers developed to survey new lands, and how we’ve arrived at modern mapmaking today. Above all else, the thread that runs throughout thousands of years of civilization is the spirit of exploration that helps us measure the shape of things around us, the world we all share.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593479254
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	08/20/2024
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	11.38(w) x 10.31(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Dean Robbins is a journalist and children's book author. His previous books include, The Fastest Girl on Earth!, Two Friends; Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, Miss Paul and the President, and Margaret and the Moon. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his family.

Matt Tavares is a New York Times bestselling author-illustrator of over twenty titles. His books have been featured in: ALA Notable, Parents' Choice Gold Awards, and twelve were chosen for the Society of Illustrators Original Art exhibit. His artwork has been exhibited at the Brandywine River Museum, the Eric Carle Museum, and the Mazza Museum. Matt lives in Maine with his wife, Sarah, and their two daughters.

Editorial Reviews

05/06/2024

Despite detailed, documentary-style illustrations by Tavares (Hoops) and eloquent prose by Robbins (The Fastest Drummer), this work offers a spotty account of how landscape-related knowledge came to be represented visually and at scale. Beginning in prehistory, the creators imagine a family recording the valley landscape they see from an enclosed rock ledge: “Mother drew dots on a cave wall. Father etched grooves into a mammoth tusk.” The survey next jumps to ancient Greeks’ speculations about Earth’s shape (positing it as rectangular, disklike, cylindrical, or spherical), then notes how “Native Americans created maps with rocks,” Egyptians painted on papyrus, Chinese mapmakers utilized wood, and Polynesians used shells and sticks. When covering how, “much later, European explorers traveled by land and sea to chart our planet... and proved that it was round,” the text elides matters of colonialism, instead focusing on refinements of accuracy and detail. Spreads return several times to the original valley landscape, which slowly becomes covered with buildings while surveyors stand in the foreground. Though several instruments are named (a compass, a Gunter’s chain, a theodolite), their workings are not explained; back matter instead examines instruments used by contemporary surveyors and cartographers. Human figures are portrayed with various skin tones. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Marietta Zacker, Gallt & Zacker Literary. Illustrator’s agent: Rosemary Stimola, Stimola Literary. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Map lovers and readers interested in the development of knowledge and technology will be drawn to Robbins’ look at how we, over millennia, have documented Earth's shape." —Booklist

From the Publisher

2024-05-04
A quick overview of the history of maps and of mapmakers’ tools from stone chisels to GPS satellites.

Less a factual history than a meditation on our innate need to record where the woods end and where streams or trails go, this survey begins with a prehistoric couple daubing marks on a cave wall and carving lines into a mammoth tusk, then zips in a vaguely chronological way around the world and to the present. Robbins delivers nods to old styles of maps from North America, Polynesia, China, Egypt, and Babylonia before ending with modern surveyors and a view of our planet from orbit. The author frames his terse commentary in broad, impersonal generalities (not always accurate ones: The world was probably “proved” to be round long before European explorers made their journeys), leaving it to the closing timeline to sprinkle specific names and dates next to a highly select set of historical artifacts and highlights. Conversely, Tavares focuses on the human element in his illustrations, depicting one figure in Renaissance clothing delightedly peering through a theodolite and elsewhere an individually drawn, racially diverse cast directly creating or using maps in various locales and successive eras. Along with this disconnect between the visual and textual approaches, huge swathes of topical territory go unexamined, from techniques of undersea mapping to basics such as map projections and common symbols.

A superficial, less-than-informative sketch. (author’s and illustrator’s notes, more information on mapmaking, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 7-9)

Kirkus Reviews