Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet

Rating:
Summary: At times more cartographic history than biography
Review: A good biography gives you not only a sense of the person, but also of the place. The very best can leave you believing the person a cousin, or even a distant brother or sister - that sense of person and place magnified almost to familial relation. I have found such books an excellent adjunct to the study of history. Not the least because they bring color and life to the sometimes dry and academic prose wielded by so many historians. Nicholas Crane's, "Mercator " is at times a lively look at the life and achievements of Gerard Kremer (known to most as Mercator); with more emphasis placed on achievement than on character.

The book begins appropriately with Mercator's birth. Crane's style is generally fluid throughout the entire work, but I found myself rereading the first two or three chapters because of what seemed to be inconsistency in dates. It turned out to be more the long expositions on current affairs that Crane sprinkles throughout than any chronological errors. The other problem I encountered was his occasional use of commodity prices to explain current conditions with little other context than implication. How much a particular item costs is useful to the extent that the reader knows such other information as how much the average worker earned in a month, or a year, and the cost of other basic necessities. Crane often fails to provide this context. Once past the bumpy beginning the rest is pretty much smooth sailing.

There are plenty of color and b&w plates. But since most of the originals are large wall-sized maps or enormous globes (at least by the standards of today) the reproductions are nearly useless for detailed examination. They are nonetheless beautiful. Mercator's innovations Crane explains textually, but the lack of useful diagrams makes understanding difficult. This is perhaps a criticism for the publisher rather than the author. The cost of including color plates and diagrams may have been prohibitive - but in that case I would have rather had less breadth and more depth i.e. fewer items reproduced but with each spread over more than one plate to permit detailed study.

"Mercator" sometimes reads more like a history of 16th century cartography than a biography of Gerard Mercator, due perhaps to insufficient primary source material. And that is my most significant criticism - that it loses incisiveness by attempting to cover both subjects rather than allowing his life to take center stage with place as a backdrop. Crane's biography will not take its place beside Ron Chernow's, "Titan" or H.W. Brands, "The First American" as one of the very best. But it is still a pleasant read and aside from my literary criticisms I have no reason to doubt Crane's scholarship. Consider it more of an appetizer than an entrée.

Rating:
Summary: Mapmaker to the World and to the Centuries
Review: Cartographers are generally an anonymous bunch. If you know one cartographer, it is probably Mercator, and you probably only know his last name because of his ingenious projection to make a flat map of our spheroid Earth. Gerard Mercator was a mild and modest man, less interested in making a name for himself than in improving knowledge of our planet. It was for others of his era within the bustling sixteenth century to cross the seas and bring back riches, and more importantly, geographical data. Mercator himself never even approached an ocean, his exploring restricted mostly to libraries and obscure reports from those who made the voyages. He never had a biography in English until Nicholas Crane produced _Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet_ (Henry Holt). The life of the cartographer is integrated with the tumultuous military, political, and meteorological events around him, for an engaging look at an original thinker.

Mercator was born as Gerard Kremer to poor parents (his father was a cobbler) in Flanders in 1512. He was fortunate in being helped in his education, and became an apprentice to a maker of instruments and globes. His engraving into copperplate was beautiful and influential. In 1537, Mercator published his first map, a portrait of the Holy Land. Four years later, he made his first terrestrial globe, and Crane makes understandable how huge such a project was. Making the lens-shaped map papers to glue onto the sphere may have inspired Mercator to calculate his projection, a map that was to be an aid to navigators ever after. Mercator lived in a tumultuous time, and his moderate views, shared with the humanists, about such things as faith in Christ being more important than ritualistic ceremony, were considered heretical by others. In 1544, he was actually imprisoned for seven months for alleged Lutheran sympathies (charged with "_lutherye_"). He remained busy until the end of his long life, during the final three decades of which he worked on a book of maps of lands all over the world which was only completed by his grandsons. There had been other such books, but Mercator's was more comprehensive. It was also more influential; he named it after a Titan of Roman mythology, and ever since, any book of maps has been called an atlas.

We are less surprised by maps than those in Mercator's time; we have instantaneous satellite pictures of the world, whenever we want them, and _terra incognita_ continues to dwindle. Everyone recognizes the true silhouettes of continents. There was a time when such knowledge was still new, and tentative. Crane has written about the many influences on his subject within this complicated historical period, and has produced a remarkably full portrait. Mercator assimilated information and made a new picture of the world, a picture now familiar to us all. His influence is not even confined to the Earth he served so well; when the Mariner missions mapped Mars, the resultant charts were Mercator projections.

Rating:
Summary: Excellant Intellectual Tale
Review: Just look at a globe or a map. To the modern man, it all seems so final. Everything is mapped out rather specifically, with all kinds of scientifically and mathematically refined numbers and measurements ordering the physical world. Just a set of numbers can identify any place on Earth now with almost perfect accuracy. After reading Mercator, you realize what a different world we live in compared to the world Gerardus Mercator inhabited around five centuries ago. To Mercator and his colleagues, who were considered the high point of scientific knowledge at the same, the world was a dark mystery that seemed limitless in its expanse. They had little to reference, save fanciful stories of explorers and the Old Testament. It was up to a group of unbelievably talented men to make the leap that mankind needed in order to fully understand the shape and scope of the world we live on.

Gerardus Mercator was by no means born into greatness. On the contrary, the Flemish born genius was of very humble origins. As Crane reminds us, humble at the time meant barely living. Every day was a struggle. Luckily, the bright young boy that would give so much to mankind had a fairly prosperous uncle who funded his education at the Church academy at Leuvren, Belgium. I considered this part of the book to be the best. Crane does a very good outline of the emerging world of western intellectualism that was taking hold in the Low Countries. The Church and its allies, at least in certain areas, were taking fairly enlightened stances, letting non-churchmen hold ecumenical exclusive positions. This resulted in a great flourishing of ideas, especially in the field of cartography and theoretical mathematics. At first, Mercator was more of a simple student, but he soon fell in love with math and its mystical promises. Rapidly, his genius would be fully engaged with the image of the world.

Unfortunately, that image was not agreed upon by some important people. Leaders did not like to see the representations of their own land reduced in any way. Nor did the Vatican like certain new features added that seemed to cast doubt on certain church doctrines. Mercator, like many other intellectuals of the era was caught up in the net of the Inquisition. However, he lived through that experience, and we are all the better for it. Crane goes very indepth into Mercators methods and mindset. The reader gets a full understanding of the calculations and stakes involved. I felt Crane gets bogged down sometimes in minutiae, that does not really help the story, but the book is very good overall. It just brings a sense of awe to the reader that the western world could produce men such as Mercator, it truly is a credit to our civilization and the ideals we all aspire to.

Rating:
Summary: Excellant Intellectual Tale
Review: Just look at a globe or a map. To the modern man, it all seems so final. Everything is mapped out rather specifically, with all kinds of scientifically and mathematically refined numbers and measurements ordering the physical world. Just a set of numbers can identify any place on Earth now with almost perfect accuracy. After reading Mercator, you realize what a different world we live in compared to the world Gerardus Mercator inhabited around five centuries ago. To Mercator and his colleagues, who were considered the high point of scientific knowledge at the same, the world was a dark mystery that seemed limitless in its expanse. They had little to reference, save fanciful stories of explorers and the Old Testament. It was up to a group of unbelievably talented men to make the leap that mankind needed in order to fully understand the shape and scope of the world we live on.

Gerardus Mercator was by no means born into greatness. On the contrary, the Flemish born genius was of very humble origins. As Crane reminds us, humble at the time meant barely living. Every day was a struggle. Luckily, the bright young boy that would give so much to mankind had a fairly prosperous uncle who funded his education at the Church academy at Leuvren, Belgium. I considered this part of the book to be the best. Crane does a very good outline of the emerging world of western intellectualism that was taking hold in the Low Countries. The Church and its allies, at least in certain areas, were taking fairly enlightened stances, letting non-churchmen hold ecumenical exclusive positions. This resulted in a great flourishing of ideas, especially in the field of cartography and theoretical mathematics. At first, Mercator was more of a simple student, but he soon fell in love with math and its mystical promises. Rapidly, his genius would be fully engaged with the image of the world.

Unfortunately, that image was not agreed upon by some important people. Leaders did not like to see the representations of their own land reduced in any way. Nor did the Vatican like certain new features added that seemed to cast doubt on certain church doctrines. Mercator, like many other intellectuals of the era was caught up in the net of the Inquisition. However, he lived through that experience, and we are all the better for it. Crane goes very indepth into Mercators methods and mindset. The reader gets a full understanding of the calculations and stakes involved. I felt Crane gets bogged down sometimes in minutiae, that does not really help the story, but the book is very good overall. It just brings a sense of awe to the reader that the western world could produce men such as Mercator, it truly is a credit to our civilization and the ideals we all aspire to.

Rating:
Summary: Mercator: a first class story
Review: Mercator, by Nicholas Crane, is a first class story about Mercator, his work and the troubled times. Mercator's methods of mapmaking were major breakthroughs in layout but it is hard to understand why that was the case, considering that we have maps everywhere today, even on demand in our cars. But Crane carefully lays out the background of discovery and politics and printing and art work that shows you why Mercator's work was so breathtakingly advanced at the time. A truly fine read.

Rating:
Summary: Mercator: a first class story
Review: Mercator, by Nicholas Crane, is a first class story about Mercator, his work and the troubled times. Mercator's methods of mapmaking were major breakthroughs in layout but it is hard to understand why that was the case, considering that we have maps everywhere today, even on demand in our cars. But Crane carefully lays out the background of discovery and politics and printing and art work that shows you why Mercator's work was so breathtakingly advanced at the time. A truly fine read.

Rating:
Summary: Unfair to Brazil
Review: The man who figured out how to make maps of the globe flat and made us think Brazil was smaller than Greenland.
A problem with reviewing a history book for a non-professional is that we can't be sure how accurate it is and we have to leave that kind of review to the historians. I enjoyed it but it is a long densely packed 320 pages. At that length I think he could have given us a little more technology and more lucid explanation of the mathematical problem involved. I would have liked more detail of how the globes were made. Since some of them survive this should be feasible. He describes some of Mercator's predecessors and might have explained more about Ptolemy's maps. But I quibble; it's a massive achievement, lucid and enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: Unfair to Brazil
Review: The man who figured out how to make maps of the globe flat and made us think Brazil was smaller than Greenland.
A problem with reviewing a history book for a non-professional is that we can't be sure how accurate it is and we have to leave that kind of review to the historians. I enjoyed it but it is a long densely packed 320 pages. At that length I think he could have given us a little more technology and more lucid explanation of the mathematical problem involved. I would have liked more detail of how the globes were made. Since some of them survive this should be feasible. He describes some of Mercator's predecessors and might have explained more about Ptolemy's maps. But I quibble; it's a massive achievement, lucid and enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: Great Geographer, Mediocre Book
Review: There is no doubt that Mercator was a great geographer. Among his achievements were: the projection bearing his name, the first modern Atlas, and even the naming of North America. He played an important role in the amazing successes and adventures of the Age of Discovery. He truly was an amazing man.

Having said this, I found Crane's book to be lacking. I thought that the book was well researched and well grounded, but the delivery was poor. When buying a popular history book, in addition to the facts I expect a gripping story, masterfully told. However, Crane's writing style is dry and while the book is filled with names, dates, facts and figures the story telling is simply not there. Crane often gets bogged down in minute details that are distracting, dry and are simply not important to the story he is trying to tell.

In short, this may be a good history book, but it is not a book that I would recommend for the typical reader of POPULAR history.

Rating:
Summary: Mercator Was a Person, Not Just a Projection
Review: Who hasn't heard of "Mercator projection"? You see it every time you pick up an atlas and look at a world map with all its longitude and latitude lines.

Well, lo and behold, Mercator was a person, Gerardus Mercator, not just a projection.

This is a terrific book for anyone interested in history that goes beyond the ordinary. In fact, there have been a lot of books about scientific history and this is a worthy addition to the genre.

Mercator was born in poverty in the Low Countries and lived to become the preeminent geographer of his time when drawing an accurate map involved doing the best you could from limited resources. Starting with globes he created the conventional way of putting a map on a flat surface with minimal distortion.

This is not the easiest book to read, but it was excellent. I recommend it to anyone who wants to deal with history beyond the usual political history.