MAPMAKER'S DREAM

Rating:
Summary: Personal Fave But With a Big Flaw
Review: <A Mapmaker's Dream> is exceedingly difficult to review since my feelings toward it are so ambivalent. If I were to judge a book by its cover I'd give this all-time-favorite status.
Design and construction (in the cloth edition) are beautifully rendered, with a brevity and diminutive size that adds to the appeal. The way it deals with obscure esoteric historical matters increases irresistibility for someone with my interests. I'd love to give it "must read" approbation, but unfortunately things aren't so simple.

There are two reasons why. First the excusable one: it doesn't play out like a traditional novel; there isn't much of a plot to speak of. But this is not an accident I believe, given
the Nominalist philosophical view implied by the book's narrative voice, which forms the
second flaw. And it is not excusable. Nominalism holds that reality is "all in your mind."
A can be B can be C, etc. Nothing is really what you think it is. Most people know a falsehood

when they see it, and this one is as destructive as they come! It is however the explicit philosophical view of many 20th century intellectuals, most notably Umberto Eco, as illustrated in the protagonist of his famous novel, <The Name of The Rose>.

What becomes starkly clear
is the reason WHY the book is no traditional novel: for in a situation where nothing can be defined for certain, a novel (or anything) can be whatever you want it to be........

It is thus with considerable trepidation that I observe <A Mapmaker's Dream>, a work of salient charm, but false underlying premises.

Rating:
Summary: Personal Fave But With a Big Flaw
Review: is exceedingly difficult to review since my feelings toward it are so ambivalent. If I were to judge a book by its cover I'd give this all-time-favorite status.
Design and construction (in the cloth edition) are beautifully rendered, with a brevity and diminutive size that adds to the appeal. The way it deals with obscure esoteric historical matters increases irresistibility for someone with my interests. I'd love to give it "must read" approbation, but unfortunately things aren't so simple.

There are two reasons why. First the excusable one: it doesn't play out like a traditional novel; there isn't much of a plot to speak of. But this is not an accident I believe, given
the Nominalist philosophical view implied by the book's narrative voice, which forms the
second flaw. And it is not excusable. Nominalism holds that reality is "all in your mind."
A can be B can be C, etc. Nothing is really what you think it is. Most people know a falsehood

when they see it, and this one is as destructive as they come! It is however the explicit philosophical view of many 20th century intellectuals, most notably Umberto Eco, as illustrated in the protagonist of his famous novel, .

What becomes starkly clear
is the reason WHY the book is no traditional novel: for in a situation where nothing can be defined for certain, a novel (or anything) can be whatever you want it to be........

It is thus with considerable trepidation that I observe , a work of salient charm, but false underlying premises.

Rating:
Summary: A Dream that could have been...
Review: A Mapmaker's Dream is a dream within a dream. Cowan's words work like magic on the pages giving the reader an interesting look into the meditations of Fra Mauro. The reader feels like an observer in all the stories of voyagers that traveler's brings to Mauro's cell. The revelations that he discovers speaks to the reader with the magic that surrounds such a work.

Rating:
Summary: Merely clever, not engaging, because inauthentic vehicle
Review: Cowan is a talented wordsmith and has fascinating trivia to explore. Having chosen a Renaissance monk as his voice, however, he should have made some effort to identify, authenticate, justify that personality and worldview. The reader needn't be an antiquarian nor a theologian to be irritated by this supposedly dedicated Christian scholar being so entirely self-referencing and self-absorbed. So much Asian mysticism and 20th century psychobabble are anachronistic. This author needs a good editor and a better thread or theme on which to exercise his talent.

Rating:
Summary: Read on!
Review: For a project in my world history class, we had to read a historical novel, then, write an essay about the plot, the story, etc.
I chose this book because it sounded interesting, and it was only 150 pages.
From the start, it was hard to understand, not to interesting, and boring. So i looked around the internet to find reviews and summaries about it, and after reading many, i found the book to be quite interesting, and i started reading it.
Later, i find out the book is worth reading because it gets better as you read on if you really think about what's going on.

Rating:
Summary: Well worth the reading
Review: I beg to differ with several who have reviewed this book before me. The premise of the book - a monk trying to draw a perfect map of the world - frames the story in a worldview very different than our own. Understanding the prefect map to require knowledge of the flora, fauna and culture of the place is far from our concern with projections and satellite accuracy.

Once one has understood the fundamental world view of the monk, the story becomes an interesting unfolding of stories from a variety of travelers - some true, some fanciful - that slowly brings Fra Mauro to question the presuppositions of his world view.

As such, the book helps us to understand something of the strain on European culture as it opened out to the rest of the world in the age of exploration.

Rating:
Summary: rich stew of ideas
Review: Inevitably a book that confirms or conforms to our own conceits has a particular appeal. So it is entirely possible that other readers will not enjoy this slender but potent novel of ideas as much as I did. But, because I agree with so many of the concepts contained within and with the central premise on which it is based, I really thought it was extraordinary.

The narrative structure of the book is deceptively simple. James Cowan claims to have found the journal of the 15th century Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro. Within the pages of the journal, Mauro describes his work on what he hopes will be his masterpiece, a great mappa mundi (world map) that will contain everything that he knows about the geography of the world (the map pictured above is actually not the map described in the book, but instead the only known surviving Mauro map). The irony, of course, is that Mauro lived in the monastery of San Michele di Murano and was not himself a traveler or explorer. His definitive map was to be based on knowledge acquired by and from others. The journal describes visits he received from individuals who had actually traveled abroad and were interested in sharing their knowledge with him.

Now I spend a lot of time in these reviews unabashedly arguing for the supremacy of Western Civilization--its Culture: music, literature and the plastic arts; Political and Social Institutions; Economic System; Scientific advances; etc.. And it seems to me that there is one great achievement that is really central to all of the achievements or, at the very least, has facilitated all of them; that is the development of means to systematize, retrieve and pass on knowledge. It should be obvious on its face that no culture that failed to produce a written language can lay any claim to even being a true Civilization. Even those which developed languages, but failed to develop knowledge or failed to accumulate and preserve knowledge, can hardly claim to be great Civilizations. And those which made developed some capacity to further knowledge and to safeguard the results for the use of subsequent generations, but failed to disseminate such knowledge widely, must pale by comparison too. For what we in the West achieved was a set of systems for accumulating knowledge, experimenting in order to increase that knowledge, storing and sharing that knowledge widely and a series of religious and political theories to induce citizens to strive to further all of these achievements.

So it is that an early map maker like Fra Mauro, cloistered within his cell, can take on such a heroic aura and his story can be so exciting. And here are some of the passages where Cowan develops some of these same ideas:

-----

Mauro is visited by an elderly Jew of Rhodes, who tells him:
It is in us all, this desire to experience the kinship that exists between our innermost being and the
will that created such a kinship in the first place. As such a desire is realized, we become
preoccupied with strange and uncanny aspects in Nature herself. We are almost tempted to regard
them as our own moods, our own creations. For my part, I know that the boundary between
myself and Nature sometimes wavers and melts away, so that I can no longer be sure whether what
I see with my own eyes springs from outward or inner impressions. An experience such as this is
one sure way of discovering how creative we are, and how deeply our soil participates in the
perpetual creation of the world. The same invisible divinity is at work in us as it is in Nature. If the
outside world were perchance to perish, I know that any one of us would be capable of rebuilding
it. I say these things because I believe that mountain and stream, leaf and tree, root and flower,
everything that has ever been formed in Nature lies preformed within us and springs from the soul,
whose essence is eternity. Of course, this essence is beyond all our conceivable knowledge, but we
can feel it nevertheless.

------

And just in passing you come across such gem like sentences and ideas as this one: "Quitting the place that we love means that we are condemned to inhabit our loss forever."

I urge everyone to read and enjoy this book. The journal entry style makes it particularly susceptible to reading in separate nightly installments. It is a book that you can easily pick up and put down, as indeed you may wish to in order to savor the rich stew of ideas.

GRADE: A+

Rating:
Summary: Boring and Pretentious
Review: Not my cup of tea. I really REALLY wanted to like it, but I could not. Too slow, too earnest for its own good. Cowan writes nice words but strung together, they create a series of pieces that seem to make the author appear to jump up and down saying "look at me! Look how smart I am!"
Sorry, just didn't take.

Rating:
Summary: This is an excellent book
Review: This novel, the story of a Renaissance monk, Fra Mauro, who was acartographer living in Venice, was delightful. I was hooked from theintroduction on. The way the introduction was written it sounded like Fra Mauro really existed, but that could be part of the story. The story is about this monk, living in a monestary in Venice, who's dream is to create a perfect world map. He does this in spite of the fact that he has never traveled. He is visited by sea captains and travelers of all sorts who tell him what they have seen. The real story is in what the travelers tell him and how he makes those tales his own. This book was a pleasure to read. I have recommended it to several friends and will continue to do so. This is not a difficult book to read. It can be read on many different levels. I hope you enjoy it.