Toby Lester

A whole book about a single drawing - albeit a drawing so pervasive that it practically defined the word "meme" decades before the internet was a gleam in some nerd's eye? I was intrigued enough to pick up the audiobook version of this work, and am so glad I did.

You know the drawing I'm talking about, don't you? Da Vinci's yellowed sketch of a naked man outlined in a circle and a square? Even if you never realized it had a name - "Vetruvian Man" - you know the picture I'm talking about: show more everyone does. But I had no idea of the fascinating cosmological, religious, medical, artistic, and architectural significance of the drawing until I devoured this short but thoroughly-researched account of the sketch's antecedents in ancient and medieval text and art.

Yes, the book provides intriguing insights into Da Vinci's life and world, but the truly captivating take-away from the book is a deeper understanding of how mankind's perceptions of the world - and his role in it - have evolved through time, shaped along the way by religion, art, philosophy, medicine, science, math, cartography, fear, wonder, and - above all - curiosity.

Turns out some pictures really are worth 1000 words! show less

I read history books the way others read genre fiction. Some of them are well-written and some not, some well-sourced and some not. Sometimes a book claiming to be a work of historical scholarship is actually a political screed. When I read one well-written, well-sourced, and about a subject not often tread, I am in my happy place. The Fourth Part of the World is one of those books and it's about maps.

To be precise, it is about one map: the first map in the world to name the New World show more "America." But to get to that point, one has to go back in time and start with the Medieval maps of the 12th century and slowly move the clock forward through the Golden Horde and the Crusades. The Travels of Marco Polo and "the Book" -- no authoritative version of the travels of Marco Polo exists but any number of versions await a reader's pleasure. The endless fascination and eternal quest to find Prester John, an imaginary king with an imaginary army waiting just over the hills to come to the assistance of the Crusaders and who existed in every unexplored corner of every map. The re-discovery of Greek in Western Europe, lost for a thousand years, and the translation of Claudius Ptolemy's Geographie, a book with instructions on how to draw maps, described latitude and longitude, and with 8000 places in the ancient world. Great convocations on religious matters where men of learning got together and, for the first time in dark rooms, discussed the forgotten philosophies and mathematics of the ancient world as they were feverishly translated, and exchanged books. The printing press. The invention of the Caravel. Dreams of Japan. The Portuguese and Africa and what they found there. The first trip around the Cape of Good Hope. The men of Bristol who saw something, once, a long stretch of coastline while chasing schools of cod. Columbus. John Cabot. Amerigo Vespucci. de Medicis and Papal Spies and secret societies of Royal mapmakers and the quest for the way to India. Lies and false letters and Monarchies jostling to lay hands on the New World.

And it all comes together with two men in a small town outside of Strassburg, one a philosopher and one a cartographer, who had access to a printing press, a stolen map of the New World, and a set of forged letters full of imaginary extra adventures of Amerigo Vespucci. They fell in love with the alliteration of Africa and Asia and Europe and, with small metal letters and newly translated Latin poetry in their heads, named the new world America. It was a best seller for twenty years but maps being what maps are and they wore out as new ones appeared. The map disappeared from the face of the Earth until one copy complete, in tact, and whole, found... and now in the Library of Congress.

The book ends with a very nice touch of the impact of the maps of the New World on Nicolaus Copernicus who quotes much of the intro text to the first true world map in his On the Revolutions. It leaves proof that, while perhaps not all of his theories of the Earth revolving around the Sun came from this source, it had bearing on his thinking. With the Fourth Part of the World, the old Aristotelean view of the world no longer worked. And if it didn't work, what else about how the world worked was outright wrong.

The Fourth Part of the World is terrific. For anyone interested in the history of maps and learning in Western Europe, or the Age of Discovery, I can completely recommend this book. It's a fun read, it's well written, it's incredibly well sourced, it is full of pictures of maps to help with the text, and it's all around great.

Fantastic. An easy 5 star rating. show less

The librarian who put this book on the 'discard-for sale' shelf should be fired, but the library's loss was my gain--for US$1 I acquired one of the most fascinating and readable discoveries that will never leave my library shelves. As other reviewers have noted, this is far more than a history of the first map to specify 'America' and credit Amerigo Vespucci with its discovery (and I would heartily recommend a title change when the book is reprinted, which I am sure it will be). It covers show more more than the history of early exploration and map-making; the great explorers of Spain, Portugal and Italy; the early philosophers and cartographers (Ptolemy, Strabo); the emergence of the printing press and its role in spreading a new world of enquiry that would develop into the a great humanist movement; the politics and compromises of competing nations and explorers. All of these are interwoven into a rich, wondrous tale that is full of fascinating insights into the age. Everyone (I hope) knows the story of Bartholomeu Dias and his rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, but how many of us knew that he was the Portuguese captain lying at anchor off the coast of Portugal who spotting a Spanish ship in its waters, boarded the ship to challenge its presence ... to encounter Christopher Columbus, returning from his first trip to the Indies! Every school teacher of history and geography needs to read this book to understand how the subject of geography should be taught--not as the names of rivers and mountains and crops, but as a vast net of exploration, enquiry, coincidences, hard work, disappointments, happenstance, perseverance and at times just blind luck.

I am a lover of global history with a special interest in Asia (and early maps), but anyone who recalls even the remotest bits of their early childhood education will find this book an exciting intellectual upgrade that pays off. It not only asks the questions we were usually too slothful to ask (primarily, "Why?") but entices us into opening atlases, pulling other reference works off the shelves, or reflecting on long-forgotten topics (how was the longitude problem resolved?). A special thanks as well to author Lester, for including the little linguistic asides that share with readers the reason we talk of finding our way as 'orienting ourselves' (because in medieval Europe, "East represented the origin of things", p. 32)--which is why East was placed at the top of ancient maps rather than North; or the clever 'joke' within the name 'America'; or why we speak of "spheres of influence" (p. 102).

This is the single best book I have ever found that covers the history of early global maps, early European thought, exploration, and the men (where were the women?) who were its key movers. Well researched and beautifully written, it's a page-turner. I loved every page of it and when I finished, I turned to the beginning and began reading it all over again. show less

It's relatively rare that I give a nonfiction book five stars, especially these days, when I've read most of the classic books. But here is Toby Lester's book, ostensibly about the Waldseemüller map of 1507, but it is about so much more. Lester is only a journalist, which makes many actual historians angry, but he has really written a thorough, lucid, expansive, and interesting narrative account of western mapmaking and exploration from the time of the Greeks till 1507. He traces the show more developments in thinking, sailing, exploring, drawing, everything, that lead not only to the Waldseemüller map, but how the Europeans discovered and thought about what appeared on that map. Columbus, Henry the Navigator, Vespucci, Matthew Paris, popes, prelates, scholars, booksellers, all end up as part of this well-told story. A beautifully illustrated book too, with a few colored plates and very fine black-and-white illustrations. If I get to teach a class on cartographic history soon, this book will serve as the "textbook" for the period up until 1507.

There were very few things I disliked about the book, but which appear to be my big hatreds in all books published here lately: (1) contractions in a serious work, I hate them; (2) the cumbersome, unhelpful endnote system of page numbers and quotations.

On the good side, fine sources, a fine bib, a fine "for further reading," a fine index.

Capital.

[The paperback edition corrects a few typos.] show less