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Eighteen map spreads show the distribution and use of the major languages of the world. ... Read more

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Excellent clear and comprehensive mapping for the country with detailed insets for many areas. Points of interest are highlighted.

The main map is at a scale of 1:1,000,000. Insets are as follows: Angkor Temples Area at 1:150,000; Sihanoukville at 1:40,000: Phnom Penh at 1:17,5000; Siem Reap Town at1:10,000 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Mapping Cambodia
It is hard to find good information on Cambodia, but this qualifies. This map lover thinks this is a good map. ... Read more

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Cookie McCorkle and her sidekick Walter discover a mysterious old map in a library book and link it to the recent prison escape of a bank robber. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Very nice looking book, great for Coloradoans interested in history
I found this in a local bookstore while browsing the Colorado section. I usually buy my in-laws Colorado history books every year for Christmas, as they both have lived in the state their entire lives and are really interested in history. Sometimes it's hard to find new ones they don't have, so I was very pleased to find this book.

The book itself just looks very elegant. Each map is in color and is very high quality and has information to go with it. It was very interesting to find areas that interest our family in the book to see what it looked like in the past. But please note, there are no photographs... only maps. There's enough photographical Colorado history books out there, so it's nice that this is different but still interests the same type of people.

I highly recommend this book to any Coloradoan that enjoys history and/or cartography. ... Read more

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Points out the various kinds of information which different maps offer and suggests activities for further study. ... Read more

Product Description
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. A Rookie Read-About Geography book that illustrates the different kinds of maps that are available and what they reveal about a particular region's population, animals, resources, rainfall, and historical landmarks. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

"What Maps Tell You"
This is an adequate introduction to maps for very young readers.But it does not go far enough. Early readers can grasp more.For example, instead of such large print, smaller print would make it possible to say more
on a page. The road map explanation could have told the reader about the road numbers and the rank of the roads. But, in fact, I would have first visited a neighborhood and a child's home (house or apartment), and
included a school, grocery, church, etc. Manhattan is interesting but should come later. A world map should
be preceded by state, national, perhaps continental size maps. More than one map shows lines for boundaries
but no real comment on political maps and symbols.Overall, this little book could be more useful in helping young students get ready to read maps in classand in textbooks.But it is very limited even for the audience intended.Imre Sutton, retired prof. geography, Cal State Univ., Fullerton

Great intro to maps for kids
This book is a beautiful introduction to maps for kids! It's not too complicated and yet it presents all the basics. It's fun and easy to understand for beginning readers.

Good book!
A really good beginning Map book for emergent readers of English. ... Read more

Product Description
The highly successful "Globetrotter Travel Series", which includes Travel Guides, Travel Maps, Road Atlases, Best Of Pocket Guides and In Your Pocket Language Guides, presently covers more than 90 destinations worldwide. "The Globetrotter Travel Map of Cape Town" caters specifically for the needs of tourists who are new to a destination. The town plans of the major centres pinpoint key buildings and places of interest as well as where to stay. Distance and climate charts enable travellers to plan their visits in advance. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. A Rookie Read-About Geography book that teaches readers the skill of using a map scale line to measure and calculate the distance between two points on a map. ... Read more

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Jane Urquhart’s stunning new novel weaves two parallel stories, set a century apart.

Sylvia Bradley was rescued from her parents’ house by marriage to a doctor whose care has both nourished and imprisoned her. When she meets Andrew Woodman, a historical geographer, her world changes through their devastating and ecstatic affair.

A year after Andrew’s death, Sylvia tells this story to Jerome McNaughton, a young artist whose discovery of Andrew’s body unlocks a secret in his own past. At the centre of the novel is the tale of Andrew’s grandfather, Branwell, an innkeeper and a painter, whose liaison with an orphaned French-Canadian woman sets the stage for future events.

A novel about loss and the transitory nature of place, A Map of Glass is vivid with the evocative prose and haunting imagery for which Jane Urquhart’s writing is celebrated. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Fire and Ice
In a haunting, topographically rich novel that transports the reader to a disappearing region of a rural, Canadian peninsula, two narrative time periods tell a story. The novel, textured with the natural world of impermanence and change, progresses with an almost hyperreal cohesion, drawing out its themes under drifts of snow, sheets of ice, bare-branched trees, windswept sand, and glassy lakes. The map of this region moves from macrocosm to microcosm, from the mutations of the landscape to the private storms of it inhabitants, from early nineteenth century to recent times. The story flickers beneath the earth and through the air.

Sylvia is a middle-aged woman with an unspecified "condition" that sounds a lot like Asperger's.She has one friend, who is blind, and a husband, Malcolm, who is blind to her secret life.She stays shuttered in her house,images of tables and bibelots running through her head ceaselessly, the light from the windows casting shadows and reflections that play on the artifacts and with her consciousness.She is an autodidact of esoteric knowledge, of the entire history of this isolated, disappearing, glacial town, and she makes luxuriantly detailed, three-dimensional maps of the area.One day, she gets her driver's license and starts combing the peninsula.She meets a historical geographer, Andrew Woodman, and has a long, secret passionate affair that becomes the focus of her existence. Time passes, (their affair is interrupted by a seven year separation) and she knows that Alzheimer's is eroding his mind and his life, until one day he just disappears.A year later, she reads in a newspaper that he had died (a year ago), was in fact found floating in an ice floe and discovered by a three-dimensional wilderness artist named Jerome McNaughton.

Jerome is a young man suffering from an unresolved past--an alcoholic, abusive father and withering, spineless mother--who now has difficulty committing fully to the woman he loves (Mira), of sharing all his private sorrow and rage.When Sylvia contacts him to meet and discuss Andrew, he reticently agrees.The series of meetings between Sylvia and Jerome and Mira focus on Andrew's ancestral journals--the history of the Woodmans going back to Andrew's great-great grandfather and the timber industry.What the journals reveal about Andrew and his family forms a cynosure between Jerome and Sylvia.And, in turn, their tenuous, brief bond becomes a niche where history, love, and home are revealed and a palpable epiphany takes place.

The novel's most transcendent attribute is the poetic fusion of the landscape with the themes of loss, identity, and home.The story of Andrew is told in reflection. His profession as a historical geographer cleaves with the history and geography of the region (much of it contained in the journals) and progresses to his relationship with Sylvia. Time vacillates between static and dynamic as events almost pour out of time, while the present feels stagnant until the journals' history can influence the ones left behind. There is never an immediacy that the reader feels between Andrew and Sylvia, because Andrew is already a piece of history when the novel opens.I believe the author intended that, and she effectively placed Andrew as a polestar for the healing of others.

The nineteenth century sections were, for me, the most vivid and electrifying.It was through that lens that I was able to visualize the landscape evolving by unchecked capitalism--from forest to deforestation, from rich soil to topsoil for barley, and, eventually, to sand. The tycoon daddys were reminiscent of the American robber barons J.P Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, steely tycoons who were often tyrannical. The female characters are particularly well fleshed out here.Annabelle, Andrew's great-great aunt, and Marie, his great- grandmother, added pathos to the grandeur of the industrialists.The parallels between characters from both centuries were finely drawn and the fusion of all Andrew's ancestors into his psyche gave the story its most authentic depth of character.

I did have a hard time believing that someone as cloistered as Sylvia for thirty-odd years, who is afflicted with a pronounced social disorder, could go out and have this passionate affair of tremendous life-altering proportions and yet be unnoticed by her husband.I cannot believe that Sylvia has the capacity to live a double life unobstructed.However, she is effective because of the momentum she creates around her and how she is contrasted to the changing environment, as well as paralleled to the history of this region--the hyperreal context I referred to at the beginning of my review.

The story also suffers from a clumsy construction at times.Some of the events are told in a hurried narration and some revelations are telegraphed rather than experienced. There is also a character named Ghost, an archetype who enters late and feels forced into a centerpiece arrangement.

Fortunately, the grace of this story resides in the timeless humanity that is poetically and symbolically rendered. I recommend this unique novel for its astonishing beauty, breathtaking prose, and moving themes.The flaws of this novel dissolve into the scintillating landscape.

"... there was always a mark left on a landscape by anyone who entered it...
... even if it is just a trace - all but invisible - it is there for those willing to look hard enough."Like her protagonists, Jane Urquhart delights in following those traces in a landscape.Southern Ontario, an important backdrop in her previous, exquisite novel, The Stone Carvers, is explored here primarily as an essential part of a family history. Going back some hundred years, "Timber Island" is the intricate setting for this profound and brilliantly developed multi-faceted novel that explores a lot more, of course, than the interdependence between human beings and their land.

The central figure providing the glue, so to say, for the story's different threads is Sylvia, middle-aged and apparently suffering from a "condition" that, while not defined, suggests some form of autism. Since childhood she has been more comfortable with objects rather than people, preferring to touch their permanent and solid surfaces. The unpredictability and change that human beings represent made her withdraw, until... Nevertheless, she has married her doctor who had moved into the family home, taking over her father's surgery and the gentle and considerate treatment of the "patient". Under his guidance, Sylvia slowly learns to move cautiously beyond her familiar territory into the wider neighbourhood, concentrating on establishing clear landmarks for herself. During one of these outings, she meets Andrew, a landscape and historical geographer, a man "who walked into the past", who has been researching his family history. A secret friendship ensues that lasts on and off for many years, until he disappears from her life.

The novel opens with Andrew, suffering from Alzheimer's, attempting to return to the island where his forbears had created their timber business. This is one of the most delicate and evocatively beautiful passages in the book. "...The palms of his gloved hands are open to the sky as if he were silently requesting that the world come back to him, that the broken connections of heart and mind be mended, that language and the knowledge of a cherished place re-enter his consciousness..."While there are many other sections of moving lyricism and rich imagery, making reading Urquhart's prose such a delight, this first passage draws the reader right into the mysterious connections between Andrew, Sylvia and a young, "conceptual artist", Jerome. Jerome had found Andrew's body, frozen in ice during a visit to the now abandoned island. In his art he attempts to capture civilization debris, remnants of earlier human habitation. To some extent Jerome symbolizes Urquhart's own exploration of Robert Smithson's aesthetics. The novel's title is derived from Smithson's sculpture "Map of Broken Glass"; Smithson's contention that "the artist seeks.... the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate" can be interpreted as one of the novel's underlying motives.

Sylvia, having learned of Andrew's death, seeks out Jerome, who she feels is holding "the end of Andrew's story... in a way, the last thing he told me". For the same reason, Sylvia feels compelled to share her life story, reluctantly at first, with this young stranger and finds an increasingly attentive listener. Jerome has his own demons to battle and, maybe, they can both help each other at some point.

Embedded in the present-day narrative, Andrew's journals form the middle section of the novel. They stand on their own and delve into the fascinating saga of his great-great grandfather, one of the early timber barons in Southern Ontario, and three generations of his offspring. Urquhart brings out Andrew's distinct voice: his description of the family's changing fortunes and long-term destiny is completely captivating. Their reign over the island leaves the land dramatically altered with consequences far beyond the landscape: symbolic for the impact of destroying its natural beauty and for the family's greed is the image of their fancy hotel, now almost totally submerged in sand. As a counterbalance to those driven solely by profit, there are those with more redeeming features, such as family values and, in particular, artistic talent and expression.

Art and artists always play an important role in Urquhart's novels. Sylvia is an artist of sorts: she creates tactile maps for her blind friend Julia. Maps are important to her as they establish some form of solidity and permanency. Her own maps reflect her very personal sense of landscapes, shapes and markers that she shares with her friend. Julia asked her once, how she could be sure that what she sees is what other people see. Maybe a more profound question than intended, it turns out as we, the readers, are encouraged to follow the fluid lines between her imagination and reality. Sylvia's version of her life's story, of her relationship with Andrew, with her husband, may not match the one the reader is being led to believe. Or is it?And, as Jerome muses: "maybe landscape -- place -- makes people more knowable. Or it did, in the past".This is a novel to absorb slowly, to ponder and to be carried away into different mental and real landscapes, rich in symbolism and breathtakingly beautiful at times.[Friederike Knabe]

Walking Toward the Past
[5 stars plus] This wondrous and evocative novel begins with a man walking over the ice to a distant island. He is so stricken with Alzheimer's that he cannot even remember his own name, Andrew, but the four pages in which Jane Urquhart describes his situation are almost poetry: "The whole unnamed world is so beautiful to him now that he is aware he has left behind vast, unremembered territories, certain faces, and a full orchestra of sounds that he has loved." He is walking, as one of the other characters later remarks, toward his past. The book that follows will be the slow uncovering of that past, not only as it applies to Andrew and his forebears, but by extension to the whole of Canada, its natural resources, and the way of life that squandered then vanished with them.

All this will be the subject of the central section of this three-part novel, an elegantly-told family saga beginning with an English immigrant, Joseph Woodman, who founds a timber and ship-building empire on an island just where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence River. But the main focus is on Joseph's son, Branwell, Andrew's great-grandfather. Trained in Paris as an artist, he spends the rest of his life on an uneasy balance between art and commerce, two opposing viewpoints that emerge as one of the philosophical axes of the book. Branwell's sister Annabelle in a way has it easier, because as a woman she is not expected to enter the business and so can devote herself to painting -- but all she paints are her father's ships and their destruction by water, fire, or time.

Were the novel confined to this historical story, it would still be a very good one. What makes it remarkable are the framing sections set in the present. Andrew, it turns out, was a landscape geographer, a kind of archaeologist who reconstructs earlier lives from the traces people leave in their surrounding world. Jerome McNaughton, who finds Andrew's frozen body, is an artist engaged in similar pursuits, making careful excavations, taking photographs, and building imaginative reconstructions. Both, in their different ways, make maps. So does Urquhart's primary character, Sylvia, who makes tactile maps for a blind friend, Julia, so that she may explore her landscape by feel. It is Sylvia's closeness to Andrew that brings her to Jerome's studio and begins the process of linking past to present -- a linkage that Urquhart reinforces by a web of subtle cross-references that are intricate without ever being obtrusive.

Julia is blind; Andrew developed Alzheimer's; Annabelle was lame; Sylvia appears to suffer from a form of autism; even the young and apparently healthy Jerome will turn out to have been spiritually crippled by the legacy of an alcoholic father. The most amazing of Urquhart's many feats of alchemy is that she manages to turn these apparent disabilities into gifts. The reader turns the pages with wonder, enthralled by the writer's inexhaustible ability to see familiar things in a new way. Central to it all is Sylvia, whose social limitations and fear of change will nonetheless turn her into the virtual author of a story of love and family whose very subject is change.

A MAP OF GLASS is even greater than Urquhart's excellent previous novel, THE STONE CARVERS. Both share a three-part structure; both go back into Canadian history; and both are centered around a work of visual art. The underlying inspiration here is a 1969 piece by Robert Smithson entitled "A Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis)," an 18-by-15 foot pile of broken window panes that suggests the debris of lost civilizations, but which nonetheless catches the light in unexpected ways and glistens with a mystery of its own. Urquhart's MAP is also a lament for the past, but its quiet glow of consolation is nothing short of a miracle.

By the end I really liked it
I had mixed feelings about this book, but by the end I really liked it.It was a very interesting exploration of memory, loss, impermanence, and the fragmentary nature of life.It was a very atmospheric book, evocative and descriptive, not a driven by twists and turns of plot or dialogue, but it is thought provoking, and multi-layered.I am surprised by how long it has stayed with me, and how many times I find myself thinking about it and recommending it to others...

A CANADIAN MASTERPIECE
Jane Urquhart's new novel, A Map of Glass, is a richly rextured and complex work of genius. Magnificent descriptive passages illuminate and delight.
This novel is deeply insightful,exceptionally thought provoking and remarkably moving.
Intelligent readers eveywhere, will be delighted by this rare literary jewel. ... Read more

Product Description
Describes many different kinds of maps used in daily life including weather, road, and street maps as well as those showing specialized information and even mall directories. ... Read more

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Describes how to use and understand maps and apply them in the study of geography, cartography, and social studies. ... Read more

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Product Description
Describes the history of mapmaking and provides instructions for making maps. ... Read more