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Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet
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About Mercator: The Man Who Mapped The Planet
Product Description An enthralling biography of the man who created the first real map of the world and changed civilization Born at the dawn of the age of discovery, Gerhard Mercator lived in an era of formidable intellectual and scientific advances. At the center of these developments were the cartographers who painstakingly pieced together the evidence to create ever more accurate pictures of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of all of them-a poor farm boy who attended one of Europe's top universities, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition, but survived to coin the term "atlas" and to produce the so-called projection for which he is known. Devoutly religious, yet gripped by Aristotelian science, Mercator struggled to reconcile the two, a conflict mirrored by the growing clash in Europe between humanism and the Church. Mercator solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? The projection revolutionized navigation and has become the most common worldview. Nicholas Crane-a fellow geographer-has combined a keen eye for historical detail with a gift for vivid storytelling to produce a masterful biography of the man who mapped the planet. From Publishers Weekly In the course of a life that nearly spanned the 16th century, that glorious age of exploration, a Flemish peasant's son, Gerard Mercator, helped shape the modern perception of the planet while seldom venturing beyond the confines of a corner of northwestern Europe. Crane (Clear Waters Rising), a British geographer and adventurer, makes much of Mercator's long life and uses this longevity as an organizing theme of the biography: "surviving for twice as long as many of his contemporaries, he was able to mature through two consecutive life spans." In the first half of his life, the comparatively impetuous Mercator, struggling with his ideals, was imprisoned under the inquisition. In the second, with his passions more focused, he conceived and drew the first modern map using a "projection" that solved certain navigational problems; eventually, he created the first unified compilation of maps of the world, called an atlas. The raw material here is rich: there's the story of a poor boy makes good, explorations into civil and martial turmoil, and the excitement of new discoveries. While Crane sometimes loses track of the main story amid the minutiae of shipping manifests, he does demonstrate a real talent for incorporating letters and documents from diverse sources into very readable prose, as well as teasing Mercator's personality out of sometimes scant or tangential sources. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Famous cartographer Gerhard Mercator was a fellow graduate of Erasmus' alma mater and absorbed the Renaissance humanist spirit of the 1500s. In his 86 years, Mercator saw the opening wars of the Reformation, courtesy of Charles V's and his son Phillip II's campaigns to restore Catholic power in the Spanish Netherlands. These two themes of Mercator's era, the rejuvenation of inquiry and religio-political war, frame Crane's quite detailed biography, the first in English about the geographer. One of its most surprising aspects is the cradle-to-grave abundance of information about Mercator that Crane has pulled together, which is especially surprising since lowly cobblers' sons--as Mercator was--usually leave no historical records. But relatives and teachers took to Mercator, and their confidence in the boy was eventually vindicated by his seminal cartographic achievements. Illustrations of them--his mentors and his maps--abound in this stolid volume of Mercator's techniques and turbulent times. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review "This rich and rewarding biography of the man who changed the way we look at the world . . . stand
