The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

Rating:
Summary: Island of content in an ocean of padding.
Review: 2 and a half stars.

Here is a diverting magazine article - maybe a few pages - blown out into a pretty average book. You can see where this journalist would have thought he was onto something - the basic story of the sheer volume of valuable maps stolen by one guy is interesting. Moreover not many of us know about the ins and out of the map trade, and obviously many of the first maps of an area have a story behind them. It's like someone who's put a fair bit of work into their honours thesis and thinks, "Hey, I reckon I could just push this a bit further and pull out a Ph.D."

This is where a good supervisor/editor could have stepped in and reintroduced some reality: "Mate, that'd be an excellent story, but you'll never spin it out into a whole book."

Harvey could have pushed his case. This is potentially interesting stuff, and he's a decent enough writer: the style is palatable and carries you along ... BUT, dammit, we need some better content. The book hinged hugely on whether or not his central figure was interesting enough. Gilbert Bland, however, was not only essentially unremarkable - he wasn't even available to be interviewed! At this point Harvey should have admitted defeat, cut his losses and got onto something else . Instead we get chapters of absurd padding - interviews with wildly speculating psychologists - none of whom have exchanged two words with their subject - about the unconscious motivations of collectors and thieves. Was it his difficult family background? Trauma from his years in Vietnam? Joke is after all this even Harvey himself comes up with the earth-shattering theory that Bland stole the maps because they were worth money and he was greedy.

Well, stone me - who would have thought it?

Even if Harvey had have managed to get the interview he constantly begged Bland to grant, it's dubious whether Bland would have had much interesting to say. He was a dishonest guy who stole things - it could have been computers or hardware - the only reason he was even worth an article was that he stole rare maps.

Sure, there is some engaging material in relating some of the ripping yarns of the original cartographers. But this is wholly undermined by Harvey's at times excruciatingly contrived attempts to parallel them to his own 'quests' and 'discoveries' in his search for the material to make a decent book. You'll get something like, "Magellan had to navigate his way right around the globe ... just like I was navigating my way around the globe of Bland's life," - and he'll spin this sort of spurious metaphor out for pages, investing it with some absurd synchronistic spiritual significance. While the rest of the book is mildly diverting if taken in small doses, his attempts to make some sort of powerful coherence by poring over his journey in creating the book are, well, bad. They make bad reading, they make you groan and roll your eyes.

In a sense, though, I suppose, good luck to him. He has turned all the work he'd invested in a nice idea that didn't pan out (through no fault of his own) into a completed (and successful) book. Not a bad trick given the ultimate paucity of his material. Better for him than just throwing it into the bin once he realised he wasn't going to get the interview with Bland, and the book was never going to be really good. Like a researcher whose tests didn't result in the cataclysmic results he'd hoped for, he's professionally written up and published the results anyway rather than just shrivel up. However, from the reader's perspective there are plenty of other books out there where the results did come up - where the central figures ARE fascinating. The Island of Lost Maps won't hurt you, but there are better stories to spend your time on - ones that (unlike me with this one) you won't find yourself putting aside two thirds of the way through. Let me suggest, for example, William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1998) - where the author, similarly, follows a hunch that there's a book in an interest of his, but much more successfully pulls off the mix of striking history, personal experience and novel contemporary characters.

Rating:
Summary: get to the point, stick to the point
Review: A mixed bag, this one. I picked up this book on a whim in hopes that it would help me with a story that I'm working on. A map is as good a Maguffin as any, and I wagered that the psychology behind the kind of person who would steal one would be at least a little compelling. I was right on both counts, but unfortunatly, the author doesn't end there.

I have no problems with the beginning of the book; indeed, the fast pace and details of a quirky subculture (map dealers) had me gleefully flipping pages. But then the author, having run out of story to tell, cast the reflective lens on himself. Big mistake.

With all due respect, I don't CARE about the author's obsession with the subject. Maybe I should care. But I'll never know, the author failed to convince me. He also failed to convince me that someone like Gilbert Bland warrented such obsession. Upon finishing the book, I felt bad for them both. Hallelujah, may I never be that boring.

Writing is a great way to work out what's getting under your skin. But there's a fine line between storytelling and self-indulgence. The author dropped that ball here, big time.

Rating:
Summary: An Overall Boring book with some interesting parts
Review: As a map afficianado, I was thrilled when I first purchased this book. By page 50 or so, I was still thrilled to learn about a heinous map crime and some background of the history of maps and their importance in societies. From there the book largely fails as Harvey attempts to write a long book about a map theft and the thief, which is mostly a non-story. Harvey goes to great lengths to undercover the past of the map thief, Gilbert Bland, but there is nothing there. So instead of being told that he could not find any interesting things about this "Bland" man, we are subjected to pages and pages of how Harvey's attempts to discover Bland's past and his failures to do so. Mixed in with that narration are attempts by Harvey to draw innane comparisons with this case and historical events and figures, comparisons which are really unrealistic and a bit too much to handle. There is not much of a story to tell with this map crime. Instead, Harvey rambles on forever about how there doesn't seem to be much of a story and tries to provide rediculous rationale and analysis of just another crime.

Don't waste your time, I wish I didn't. Needless to say, I want those few hours of my life back.

Rating:
Summary: Glad I bought it overstock
Review: Aside from the poor writing style, this book is effectively about nothing yet Harvey tries to write about everything. The book never comes to a focus, but instead dances around many many topics related and unrelated to cartography. The interesting thing is that the author poised himself as a researcher, yet this book couldn't feel less thought out. Thank goodness for the overstock section at my local bookstore.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely fascinating book! Better than a novel!
Review: Even if you have no interest in maps or rare map collecting or rare books, you'll love this book. You get caught up in the story and want to finish it in one sitting. A fascinating read about a world I'm not familiar with. If you like to read mystery novels, this is the kind of true story you'll like. I most highly recommend it!

Rating:
Summary: A good editor could have made this an excellent 100 pg. book
Review: I had high hopes when I ordered this book. By the time I had turned the last page of the hardcover edition I read I was thoroughly dissapointed though. The book sets out to chronicle four different, parallel stories: that of Gilbert Bland (the map thief), the sub-culture of collecting old maps, the history of cartographic crime, and the author's chronicle of working on the book.

There's very little real information on Bland or his crime, and one really wonders why a book with so much filler information was written at all just to arrive at a self-confessed conclusion the author really doesn't know anything about the subject of his book.

The sub-culture of map collecting was this book's strong suit, and the reason I feel it merits 2 stars. Some of the minor characters including a ruthless map dealer, an avid collector, and a psychologist on collectors made for interesting reading.

As a chronicle of historical cartographic crime the book fell short as well. Many of Mr Harvey's conjectures are obviously extreme stretches of the imagination, and it doesn't take being a map historian to be able to realize this. The information is spread through the book and feels more like filler haphazard filler material than any sort of a systematic study.

Which finally brings us to the story being a story about writing the story within the story (say that outloud and fast 10 times in a row). As several reviewers have noted this portion of the book was extremely tedious and consumed an alarming amount of page space especially in the latter half of the book. Mr Harvey seems content to let endless melodramatic metaphors relating his failure to interview Gilbert Bland for the book and the world of maps substitute themselves for actual good story telling.

I've been waiting for some time for a book targetted at an outsider at the world of map collecting. To Mr Harvey's credit, this work is well researched and includes an extensive bibliography and notes. This book is an unfortunate example that no matter how good your editor is or how interesting the subject, if you don't really have a story to tell the book will fall short.

Rating:
Summary: More a journey than a destination
Review: I just finished reading Island of the Maps. It took me several days to read, but every time I put it down, I kept looking for opportunities to pick it back up again. While the theft of historical maps from major universities and libraries by Gilbert Brand is, on the surface, the foundation of the book, I found the subject of the magic that maps work on the psyche to much more intriguing part of this story.

This isn't a "true crime" story, and if that's what you are looking for, I think you'll be disappointed. But if you are intrigued by the history of maps, the kinds of people who are passionate about maps, and how maps (those cartographic masterpieces as well as those that are purely mental) can take you on all kinds of journeys, then I think you'll enjoy this book. I loved the history of it, the psychology of it, and although Gilbert Bland remains a mystery, I enjoyed the journey of discovering Miles Harvey through it all.

Rating:
Summary: About as Bland as a Local Road Map
Review: I must agree with many of the reviews posted here already. This book was a little hard to slough through as it is not so much a journey as a random wandering. In claiming to tell the story of a notorious map thief (whom, the author admits very early on, wouldn't even give him an interview for this work), the book bumps around, pinball fashion, talking about history, cartography, librarians and whatever else seemed to be on the author's mind at the moment. An outline may have helped. Focusing on presenting the material in an orderly fashion may have helped. Cutting about 100 pages may have helped immensly. Sticking to a the main theme of the work may have been of great benefit to the reader (other than the "how he got caught" story, the profile of Bland doesn't begin until almost 200 pages into the work). This isn't a bad book. It just suffers from lack of focus and can be very frusterating reading at times. If you are interested in cartography, maybe give this a try. If you are a casual observer interested in Bland's crimes, good luck finding the well hidden pertinant material. This book just seemed to bear too much of a resemblence to a college thesis with too shallow a premise that had to be padded to fill the required pages.

Rating:
Summary: A Journey of Both Epic and Mundane Proportions
Review: Miles Harvey in The Island of Lost Maps (A True Story of Cartographic Crime) takes the story of a recent map thief, aptly named Gilbert Bland, and uses this story as a way to map a journey that winds and weaves its way through history, map-collecting, library security and a mixture of biography and autobiography. The wonderful aspect of this is that most of it is quite interesting and will capture most readers quickly and take them easily and pleasureably through its pages, even if one never thought he had an interest in this topic. The most fascinating aspects revolve around the subjects of map-making history and the more recent business of map collecting. Both of these were fascinating and eye-opening. The ending chapters are a little weaker as the book runs slowly out of steam but the reader should be exhausted and thrilled by that point, at any rate. A wonderful first non-fiction book.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining Exploration of Arcane Subject
Review: Through a lens on the story of a very late 20th century crime, Miles Harvey ambles through several tangent topics related to the arcane subject of antique maps in THE ISLAND OF THE LOST MAPS. It is a highly readable book that moves the reader along at a clip, plowing through the historical origins of mapmaking, the mythical powers ascribed to them, the power they brought to European discoverers and conquerors, and the power they hold for contemporary collectors.

The "island" of the title is actually a pile of maps stolen from university libraries by one thief, Gilbert Bland, in the mid 1990s. Sitting in the office of the FBI agent whose job it was to identify the owners, its story provides the most haunting revelations of the book. Harvey makes the case for the maps' value to our culture, not to mention to the collectors who crave them, and yet many of the libraries that are supposed to be their protectors behave like indifferent foster parents. The libraries that would prefer inaction to improving security, or even admitting their walls were breached in the first place, are clearly as much a threat to this fragile world heritage as the reckless thief.

Other strengths of the book include Harvey's conversations with the ethical dealers and a collector he calls Mr. Atlas. Much of the history he offers is a gloss of books like John Noble Wilford's THE MAPMAKERS. Harvey expends a lot of energy but fails to capture the psychology of the map lover. He pushes hard to find out what makes Bland tick, but the thief-cum-convict resists his entreaties to meet. I'm not sure that he would have found what he was looking for in Bland, anyway; there is enough evidence to suggest he is a criminal first, an opportunist, who found a market and an easy supply, not to mention a sleepy justice system.