Maphead - Ken Jennings

   2011; 290 pages.  Full Title: Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks.  New Author?  : Yes.  Genres : Geography; Non-Fiction; Maps.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Are you a maphead?

 

    Have you ever taped a map on the wall, just for the joy of looking at it?  Do you keep an atlas on your bookshelf, and occasionally take it out just to gaze at the maps inside?  Do ancient maps fascinate you?  Do you keep a collection of maps in a drawer?

 

    As a kid, did you like to draw maps, even if they were of imaginary places?  Do oddly-named towns {such as Intercourse, Pennsylvania, close to where I grew up) intrigue you?  Do you wish you could pronounce the name of that Welsh town with its gazillion letters?

 

    If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, you could be entitled to a reward.  No, not money.  Instead, you’re eligible to be utterly delighted by reading Ken Jennings’ (yes, that ex-Jeopardy mega-champion dude) book: Maphead.

 

What’s To Like...

    Ken Jennings is of course best known for being a contestant, long-reigning champion, and later on, host of the long-running game show Jeopardy.  But he is also an author and geography enthusiast, and Maphead is a logical consequence of that.

 

    There are twelve chapters in the book, with my favorites below in pink:

CH 01. Eccentricity.  The author’s childhood fascination with maps.

CH 02. Bearing.  Topophilia and the history of maps.

CH 03. Fault.  Geographic illiteracy.

CH 04. Benchmarks.  Map collections and town with crazy names.

CH 05. Elevation.  Map fairs, map stealing, map collecting.

CH 06. Legend.  Maps of imaginary lands and kids who draw them.

CH 07. Reckoning.  The National Geographic Bee.

CH 08. Meander.  Competitions involving visiting places.

CH 09. Transit.  “Roads scholars” and map rallies.

CH 10. Overedge.  GPS and geocaching.

CH 11. Frontier.  Google Earth and Google Maps.

CH 12. Relief.  Confluence hunting and “Earth Sandwiches”.

 

    Those chapters cover 250 pages of text, but there’s also a bunch of goodies after that.  There's a smattering of neat photographs included, and lots of footnotes.  The footnotes work well, and I highly recommend taking the time to read those marked with a “dagger” or an “asterisk”, as they often contain sidelights that are both witty and enlightening.  The footnotes marked with a “number” cite the references for Ken Jennings’s data, and can be skipped if that doesn't float your boat.

 

    The book does an excellent job of presenting the “state of the art” of geography (hint: it’s being downgraded in importance), and is jam-packed with delightful tidbits of geographical trivia.  You’ll learn why “orient” can mean both “the Far East” and “to spatially align something”; and why Bir Tawil is a piece of land that is unclaimed by any nation.  It was also eye-opening to learn that the Four Corners Monument, of which my state of Arizona is a part, is actually misplaced by a couple hundred feet.

 

    I found the chapter devoted to the National Geographic Bee absolutely enthralling.  Fifty-plus kids are grilled with questions about obscure all sorts of geography topics.  Ken Jennings gives the reader a few examples of those questions and I, who consider myself to be a geo-geek, was blown away.  One example: “Which country borders more landlocked countries—Algeria or Democratic Republic of the Congo?”

 

    Yeah, like I’d have any idea about that.  But at least I’d have a 50% chance to guessing correctly.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 659 ratings and 247 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.86*/5, based on 7,892 ratings and 1,161 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Cartacoethes (n.) : the uncontrollable compulsion to see maps everywhere.

Others: Graticule (n.).

 

Excerpts...

    Francis Billington was a teenager when his family landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, and records of that time make him out to be the colony’s Bart Simpson, an incorrigible juvenile delinquent.  He nearly blew up the Mayflower in harbor by firing his father’s musket inside a cabin where flints and gunpowder were stored.  On January 8 of the following year, Francis climbed a tree on a nearby hilltop and was surprised to see “a great sea” three miles away.  This discovery led to a good deal of pilgrim excitement—could this be the famous Northwest Passage?—but when the vast “Billington Sea” (as it is still known) was explored, it turned out to be a pond only seven feet deep.  Oops.  (page 87)

 

    “How many countries have you been to?” she asks. (…)

    Uh-oh.  I’d been doing a mental count in the car on the way here.  I feel like a reasonably well-traveled guy, having lived on three continents.  And yet my total is a dispiriting twenty-four—and that’s counting a ninety-minute layover in the Taipei airport, as well as the time I stuck my foot across into the North Korean side of a conference room during a high school trip to the DMZ.

    “Twenty-nine,” I lie, rounding up to the nearest, uh, prime.

    Louise is taken aback.  “What are you doing writing a book about geography if you’ve only been to twenty-nine countries?”

    Touché.  (page 151)

 

Kindle Details…

    Maphead currently sells for $13.99 at Amazon, although I snagged it when it was temporarily discounted.  Ken Jennings has another dozen or so e-books for your Kindle; they range in price from $2.99 to $13.99.  About half of these are in his “Junior Genius Guides” series, whose target audience is 8-10-year-olds.

 

“You can’t spell “geocaching” without “aching”.  (page 210)

    There’s a smidgen of profanity in Maphead, seven cases in the first 20%.  Still, that surprised me a bit since this is a non-fiction tome about geography.  I also spotted one typo: “globetrotting” got split up at the end of a text line into “glo-betrotting”.  I suspect that was the formatting program’s error though, not the author’s.

 

    That’s all I can come up with to gripe about.  Maphead was an awesome read for me: interesting, imaginative, enlightening, and at times just downright witty.  I’m not saying the book will inspire every reader to take up geocaching or arrange to visit, and document with photos, the highest point in every state in the USA.  But if you loved geography class as a kid, you’re going to enjoy this book from beginning to end.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  There’s a quiz in the back of the book titled “Are You a Maphead?”.  Forty questions of varying difficulty, with the answers supplied thereafter.  I got 26 of the 40 correct, which meant I made it, albeit just barely, into the “Sensei of Direction” tier.  Give it a try after reading this book to see how much of a maphead you are.  No cheating!