Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason
by: Gunnar Olsson

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. 553 pages, b&w illustrations. A spectacular reading of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases, Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein, Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh, and Marcel Duchamp, Abysmal is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. Olsson roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails. A work of ambition, scope, and sharp wit, Abysmal will appeal to an eclectic audience--to geographers and cartographers, but also to anyone interested in the history of ideas, culture, and art. Name written on front fore-edge of book, otherwise clean.