Kirkus Review
An eye-opening visual look at the assumptions and trends that lie beneath how the modern world ticks. In 2019, writes geographer Cheshire, the FAA tracked 11.2 million commercial flights over U.S. airspace. That's an astonishing number. More astonishing is the fact that this number was only a modest increase over 2009, yet during that decade, passenger numbers had grown by a third. This suggests that those additional millions of passengers were packed like sardines inside those planes, which "seemed like a good strategy until the pandemic." Working with former National Geographic designer Uberti, Cheshire serves up revealing data about the modern world, his eye set on patterns that illustrate changes in our time. For instance, the authors track the signals sent from mobile phones to monitor migration patterns, which figure into a body of statistical and visual data that "illustrate how a warming planet affects everything from hurricanes to the hajj." Eschewing what mathematician Edward Tufte calls "chartjunk," Cheshire and Uberti look with admirable clarity at other patterns over time. One map, for instance, depicts the number of "vagrancy houses" made available in Cheshire's native England to the homeless a century ago. The program involved removing these people from London, but at least they had somewhere to go, even if that somewhere amounted to "holding pens." With economic decline and social change, the number of such people has mounted today, even as 216,000 houses sat vacant across the country. Using such data to point to a problem and a solution at once, Cheshire asks, "Why not make the housing permanent?" In a work that brilliantly demonstrates how big data and its visual representation can be put to work, the authors analyze the shift from rural to urban residence across the world, the mixed-race DNA that most of us carry without necessarily knowing it, the connections of rivers to commerce, and many other matters of compelling interest. Demography and graphic design meet in an extraordinarily revealing book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The award-winning team of Cheshire and Uberti (London: The Information Capital; Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics) collaborate for the third time in this unique volume. In the preface, Cheshire asserts that this atlas is intended as "an ode to the unseen, to a world of information that cannot be conveyed through text or numbers alone." The authors uncover this world through striking maps and infographics divided into four chapters, titled "Where We've Been," "Who We Are," "How We're Doing," and "What We Face." Highlights include infographics presenting data on light emissions around the globe, a map of the United States redrawn according to commuter hubs, and stats on bike share programs by city. "What We Face" dramatically demonstrates the effects of climate change through maps of receding glaciers, burn scars across the Earth, and even airplane turbulence. In addition, the volume provides a brief history of the statistical atlas as a form, information about the techniques cartographers use to depict the Earth on a flat page, and suggestions for further reading. The resulting atlas will enable readers to better understand the world and its challenges. Furthermore, as the authors express eloquently in the epilogue, it is designed to inspire readers to act. VERDICT This work will appeal to readers with a wide range of interests, including cartography, history, and the environment.--Dave Pugl, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL
