Product Description

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) was born at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, when the world was beginning to be discovered and carved up by navigators, geographers and cartographers. Mercator was the greatest and most ingenious cartographer of them all: it was he who coined the word 'atlas' and solved the riddle of converting the three-dimensional globe into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings. It is Mercator's Projection that NASA are using today to map Mars. How did Mercator reconcile his religious beliefs with a science that would make Christian maps obsolete? How did a man whose imagination roamed continents endure imprisonment by the Inquisition? Crane brings this great man vividly to life, underlying it with colour illustrations of the maps themselves: maps that brought to a rapt public wonders as remarkable as today's cyber-world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #249094 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Synopsis
Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) was born at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, when the world was beginning to be discovered and carved up by navigators, geographers and cartographers. Mercator was the greatest and most ingenious cartographer of them all: it was he who coined the word 'atlas' and solved the riddle of converting the three-dimensional globe into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings. It is Mercator's Projection that NASA are using today to map Mars. How did Mercator reconcile his religious beliefs with a science that would make Christian maps obsolete? How did a man whose imagination roamed continents endure imprisonment by the Inquisition? Crane brings this great man vividly to life, underlying it with colour illustrations of the maps themselves: maps that brought to a rapt public wonders as remarkable as today's cyber-world.

From the Inside Flap
Mercator is a vivid biography of the man who created the first modern map of the world. Born into the age of discovery, Gerard Mercator lived through an extraordinary era of intellectual and scientific expansion. At the centre of this exploratory vortex were the cartographers who were painstakingly piecing together the evidence that would create a complete picture of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of them all - a poor cobbler's boy who attended one of Europe's top universities, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition, yet survived to produce his eponymous projection and to coin the term 'atlas'. Devoutly religious, yet gripped by the quest for geographical truth, Mercator struggled to reconcile the two, a conflict mirrored by the clash in Europe between humanism and the Church. Mercator solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? The Mercator Projection revolutionised navigation and has become the most common worldview.

About the Author
Nicholas Crane is a geographer, adventurer and prize-winning writer.

Customer Reviews

stodgy, dull and incredibly hard-going
I have to confess that I'm only about a third of the way through this book but it is a struggle. Crane has managed to take what should have been an exciting story and bog it down so much that there is no sense of intellectual excitement or even the personality or mind of such an amazing man as Mercator. I am keeping going because I want to understand the achievemtnts of the man, but that is despite of the book rather than through the book - a sad indictment of the author, I'm afraid. This is a tale crying out to be well-told, but Crane sadly isn't the author to do it.

A disappointingly dull tale
Fascinated by the romance of early mapping, intrigued to know more about Mercator, and encouraged by very positive reviews, I looked forward keenly to reading this biography. I have to confess to finding it very heavy going. Crane has laboured mightily in wondrously obscure sources, but for me he has failed to handle his material effectively; at times the 'scene-setting' is so pedantically and referentially detailed that my interest in the historic context was wholly exhausted, and I urgently wanted him to get on with the biography. At other points - as in his involvement with his first globe - Mercator's career seems to advance by quantum leaps without an adequate account of how and why that suddenly became possible.

But the particular failing for me is that the book seems to fall between two stools. It is hardly in the current genre of popular historic science books, which are usually racey, stimulating, and selective in their treatment: Crane's strangely disengaged manner of writing manages to dissipate almost entirely the excitement and romance in this great work of mapping the globe at a time of extraordinary opening-up of European consciousness of the world. On the other hand it lacks the analytical rigour and explication of a full-blown scientific biography.

I did read through all the way to the end, but more from a dogged sense of wanting to learn what Crane could tell me rather than from any enjoyment or sense of close engagement. I suspect that there may already be a lot of one-third-read copies of this book on shelves around the country.

An incredible book about an incredible man
This has been one of the most enjoyable biographies that I have read in a long time. Nicholas Crane gets the formula right here in a well written and wonderfully researched book.

To be able to write a book about someone like Mercator who lived so long ago is an achievement in itself. To provide a detailed account of Mercator's life and his astounding works exceeds expectations magnificently.

Mercator did not travel very far from his home, but yet was able to create globes and maps of all the known world that were wonders of their era. He gives his name to the Mercator Projection that geographers over the world know and love.

I enjoyed the non-geographical side of Mercator's life - his survival through the Inquisition inspires me to believe that the zealots who set out to "protect" religion in Mercator's time were prevented by God Himself from depriving the human race of Mercator's genius.

For geographers, this book is a must. For general historical and biographical readers, you will not be disappointed with this book.

Five stars is not enough - this is a splendid read.