The Map that Changed the World – Simon Winchester

From the author of the bestselling THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN comes the fascinating story of William Smith, the orphaned son of an English country blacksmith, who became obsessed with creating the world’s first geological map and ultimately became the father of modern geology.

The Map That Changed the World is Available Here  

 

 The Mapmaker’s Wife – Robert Whitaker

In 1735, a team of French scientists, led by Charles Marie de La Condamine, traveled to Quito in colonial South
America with the intention of precisely measuring the distance of one degree of latitude at the equator. Theirs was the first scientific expedition to the New World, and it was designed to answer the most pressing scientific question of the day. What was the exact shape of the earth? Was it shaped like an orange, squashed at the poles and bulging at the equator, or vice versa, elongated at the poles and cinched in at the equator? By comparing the distance of one degree of latitude at the equator with a degree of latitude in France (or to one in Lapland), the French scientists would be able to answer this question.

The Mapmaker’s Wife is Available Here

 

Longitude – Dava Sobel

Longitude tell a life-and-death story behind the gridwork of lines that appear on every world map and globe. In the early days of sail, mariners had no accurate means of determining  their position at sea.
Indeed the entire Age of Exploration was carried out without anyone’s ever knowing where he was! Since ships lost track of their longitude as soon as they lost sight of land, innumerable tragedies befell navies and traders – until John Harrison, a self-educated clockmaker, solved the problem of longitude  in the mid-eighteenth century and laid claim to the great Longitude Prize offered by Parliament.

Longitude is Available Here

 The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet – Reif Larsen

When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian
announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal – if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal – is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just
north of Divide, Montana, to the museum’s hallowed halls.

Book description - A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet’s attempts to understand the ways of the world.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is Available Here

 

Walking Zero – Chet Raymo

In Walking Zero, Chet Raymo uses the Prime Meridian-the line of zero longitude and the standard for all the world's maps and clocks-to tell the story of humandkind's intellectual journey from a cosmos not much larger than ourselves
to the universe of the galaxies and geologic eons.

 

Walking Zero is Available Here

 
 
Jacquard's Web : How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age –  James Essinger

Jacquard's Web is the fascinating story of how Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a loom that was to spark the beginning of today s information age. The astonishing new loom, invented in 1804, enabled the master weavers of Lyons to create their beautiful silk fabrics 25 times faster than had ever been possible before. This device used revolutionary punched cards to store instructions for weaving the required pattern or design.

Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age is Available Here

 Hungry Planet – Peter Menzel, Faith D’Aluisio

Imagine inviting yourself to dinner with 30 different families... in 24 countries. Imagine shopping, farming, cooking and eating with those families... taking note of every vegetable peeled, every beverage poured, every package opened. Well, that is what photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D'Aluisio did for their new book, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.

The husband-and-wife team wanted to see how globalization, migration and rising affluence are affecting the diets of communities around the globe. Each chapter of their book features a portrait of a family, photographed alongside a week's worth of groceries. There is also a detailed list of all the food and the total cost.

Hungry Planet is Available Here

Material World – Peter Menzel

In the early 1990s, after hearing a story about "Material Girl" Madonna's latest self-promotional enterprise, photojournalist Peter Menzel had a vision: Rather than take viewers into the mansions of the rich or the "cribs" of MTV celebrities, he wanted to capture the material life of average families around the globe. His resulting book, Material World, offers extraordinary images of families in front of their dwellings with all (or nearly all) of their possessions. Experts at the United Nations and World Bank helped determine the criteria for average families according to location (urban, rural, suburban, small town, or village), type of dwelling, family size, annual income, occupation, and religion. Here, we present five of the photographs Menzel and his team produced, along with updated statistical data for each country.—Susan K. Lewis

Material World is Available Here

 

 
A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail is a 1998 book by travel writer Bill Bryson, describing his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend "Stephen Katz" (a pseudonym for Matthew Angerer, of Des Moines, Iowa). The book is written in a humorous style, interspersed with more serious discussions of matters relating to the trail's history, and the surrounding sociology, ecology, trees, plants, animals and people.

The book is to be adapted into a movie, to star Robert Redford and, most likely, to be directed by Barry Levinson.

A Walk in the Woods is Available Here

  The Mother Tongue – Bill Bryson

The Mother Tongue is a book by Bill Bryson, which compiles the history and origins of the English language and the
language's various quirks. It is subtitled English And How It Got That Way. The book discusses the Indo-European origins of English, the growing status of English as a global language, the complex etymology of English words, the dialects of
English, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and more minor topics including swearing. Bryson's account is a popularization of the subject, designed to entertain as well as to inform, and the book is sprinkled with trivia and language lore.

The Mother Tongue is Available Here