The World According to Wine

At 400 pages, British wine experts Huge Johnson and Jancis Robinson have created their most exhaustive atlas yet, and a tremendous resource. The book is gorgeous - with a generous amount of color illustrations, photos, and maps, including 2 page spreads. All told there are 48 extra pages over the previous edition. <br /><br />The 6th edition contains 200 maps, all revised and updates, including 20 new maps. The introduction contains essays on wine in the ancient world, vine types, grape varieties, weather, terroir, the wine growers calendar, how wine is made, etc. etc. Robinson has said this new edition took two years of concentrated effort. It was worth it! <br /><br />Then the authors dive deep into wine regions organized by country. Each region or country covered has a colored map, an essay about the characteristics of the reason, vital statistics, and a few wine labels. France has the most with 55 regions featured, indeed, a quarter of the volume (100 pages) is on France. Italy features 18 regions. Spain 9. Portugal 6. Germany 12. United States 17. Australia 12. New Zealand 4. Other countries covered include: England and Wales, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Western Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Former Soviet Republics, Greece, Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, South Africa, China, Japan, and the rest of Asia. I find the information scant on Chile and Argentina, which is odd given their increased market exposure and rising excellence of wines. <br /><br />The authors have expanded New World coverage, in keeping with expanded exposure and quality of the wine produced in these regions, for Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, South America, and South Africa. These are additions, with nothing taken away from the previous fabulous coverage of Old & New World wine regions. <br /><br />Since the first edition in 1971, the World Atlas of Wine has sold more than 4 million copies and I'm happy to add this new 6th edition to my library, especially at such a reasonable price. It's always a pleasure to look up some background information on tonight's glass of wine.

Review of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World

This atlas is basically an updated reprint of the previous edition, published 6th October 2003 (see my review of this), but with the 1:5,000,000 Alaska plate restored from the old copper plate edition due to public protest at its removal. As it is the largest and most comprehensive world atlas currently available with an index of approximately 200,000 place names, I have given it a five star rating. However, its two failings, in my opinion, are that there are no town or city plans, and that it no longer attempts to map the whole world at at least 1:5,000,000 which the old copper plate edition did. If only it left out the 'encyclopaedic information ' section at the beginning, it would have room to do both of these things. However, it is still a wonderful atlas, and tremendously good value at the discounted price offered.

Usborne Sticker Atlas of the world

My son really enjoyed this book. It captured his imagination and we have had lots of interesting chats about different countries and cultures around the world. Excellent for participation and goes really well with associated books on flags and geography.<br /><br />Andrew McCulloch and Douglas (5)

Not good for size of countries

This map is the Mercator one which almost everyone sees and is good for navigation but is totally incorrect for showing the size of countries and continents. It shows Greenland to be about the same size of Africa when in fact, Africa is 13 times larger.<br /><br />Everyone should look up Peters Projection on the web to realise this.

Standard work

A comprehensive atlas. Standard reference work. You will not need another unless you want one that is more portable

This is a Big, Brilliant Book!

I bought this book solely as I'm planning to travel around the world at some point and I wanted some up-to-date maps and the most current atlas i could borrow had Germany as two separate countries!<br /><br />Any way, this atlas arrived yesterday and I've not had a lot of time to look at it but leafing through it (if you can leaf through a book that would give you a hernia from lifting it for too long) I can see I'm going to spend a LOT of time reading it and studying the maps.<br /><br />In usual atlas format, the front is full of various information about the world. Geographical, political and economical. There is a section on the universe and solar system in which I was most disappointed that Pluto wasn't one of the planets (as you'd expect after it's demotion) but it still gets an honourable mention so I was slightly appeased! There's also a section with images of the world taken from space which are really interesting to look at, as well as climate information and some basic bits of information about every country (currency, population, area, capital etc). There's also sections on seasons, oceans, the atmosphere and climate, bio diversity, population and it just goes on and on (this is the bit I'll be reading again and again).<br /><br />Then there's the maps themselves. The inside front cover (double page spread) shows the world map with various boxes around areas indicating that there is either a large, medium or small scale map (and the page number is shown in the corner of the box) and the inside back cover shows the same for Europe on it's own. The continent maps are shown in physical and political forms or sometimes combined. There is a great amount of detail and it is easy to see boarders, major cities, major roads, airports and many, many place names.<br /><br />There are also thirty-one pages of small maps of major cities showing excellent detail including street names, landmarks and attractions.<br /><br />I've never really studied an atlas before so I don't know if there's anything else that could have been included that hasn't been. I know I'm going to very much enjoy taking a more in-depth look at the atlas. The only thing that might put people off is the size and weight of it. It's a very big book but it's really worth a look!

stunning

If you only ever buy one book on the architecture of our time buy this one!
Insparational, Beautifuly put together and packed with the information you need to know.
It takes weeks to get through it all and it weighs a ton.
After many of the buildings in this book will crumbled in to the earth this book will still be standing.

Review of the Times Atlas of the World Comprehensive Edition

Editions One to Eleven of the Times Atlas of the World used copper engraved plates taken from the famous 5 volume Mid Century Edition. Edition Twelve onwards used brand new computer produced digital plates. This Thirteenth Edition is an update of the Twelfth Edition. <br /><br />The Old Edition of the Times Atlas aimed to cover the whole world at a minimum scale of 1:5,000,000 using maps from the 1954 Russian Atlas Mira to fill in Siberia at this scale. The present atlas falls a long way short of this goal, and as well as loosing these fantastic Russian plates, also looses the 1:5,000,000 Alaska plate. Other plates to go are those of Switzerland, The Low Countries and The Holy Land at 1:500,000. No longer can we locate Gangelt in the Netherlands where Mercator lived and worked. Also to go are all of the town plans. <br /><br />The new Edition instead offers more maps at intermediate scales such as better maps of Eastern Europe, Eastern China, Korea, Central Japan, Central South America and South East Australia. Some of the new maps such as that of Poland seem overly detailed. Even with the aid of a magnifying glass, I cannot make out the name of Oswiecim, the new name for Auchwitz, as it is too small and cramped to read.<br /><br />The style of the maps has also changed. I prefer the old copper plate maps as the contour lines have been omitted from the new digital maps giving a blotchy appearence to the hill colouring. just compare the maps of Sicily from the old and new editions to see how in the old edition, Mount Etna seemed to stand out from the page.<br /><br />Despite this, the latest Edition of the Times Atlas is in my opinion the best World Atlas currently available. This is due to the sheer breadth and detail of world coverage as well as the quality of the mapping. The index contains 200,000 place names which is greater than any other world atlas available in book form.<br /><br />Other World Atlases to consider at this size and price are the Rand McNally International World Atlas and the National Geographic World Atlas. They are both American publications. The Rand McNally is better for urban areas but not as good as the Times for general world coverage, and the National Geographic is a large format political atlas very good for North America but not as good for Europe or Asia as the other two. However, if I had to choose my favourite world atlas of all time then it would have to be the Old copper-plate Edition of the Times Atlas of the World.<br /><br />Andrew Taylor<br /><br />Worsley, Manchester<br />

Intriguing book about one of the fathers of geology

I admit it... I'd never heard of William Smith. In fact the reason I picked up this book was it seemed an interesting title and I'd read a couple of other Simon Winchester books and found them to be a really interesting read.

William Smith was a self-taught geologist who recognised that in different parts of Britain the underground rock structure was different. He therefore took it upon himself to create an underground map of Britain showing how the various rock formations co-exist.

The narration of Smith's life is fascinating, encompassing a determination to succeed despite being a blacksmith's son (seen at that time as being an unsuitable background for someone wishing to mix with aristocracy). It tells of how this desire resulted in bankruptcy, prison, but only years later getting some of the recognition he deserved.

I would definitely recommend this book if you have read other Simon Winchester books before, or if you are interested in learning a bit about geology and how this science started out.

Beck and all

A timely update to the first edition in 2003 with a new Zone 6 listing all the latest and proposed subway systems around the world. The extra Zone now includes hybrids like tram-trains, monorail or light rail and they all need maps. The other five Zones in the original have had their contents revised also.<br /><br />I think the beauty of the book is in looking at the way various transit companies have approached the problem of communicating (sometimes complex) information in a simple way for passengers yet each map has its unique points. The book's authors rightly trace the origins of the modern designed transit map to London Transport's Harry Beck. His genius was to discard the geographic location of stations and have route lines as either vertical, horizontal or at forty-five degrees. It's amazing to see how many maps of the dozens in the book still follow this general principal. <br /><br />However, creating a map that might look graphically stunning is not always enough. New York's MTA got Massimo Vignelli to design their map and it looks a visual treat but passengers weren't impressed and found it confusing so the MTA revised it. Vignelli's 1979 map and the latest 2007 MTA one are shown together on a spread in the book, two maps with the same information yet looking so different.<br /><br />This update has a few more train and station photos to fill the space that was frequently left blank in the first edition and there is a nice touch with a spread near the back that includes some fantasy maps. If I have a fault with the book it is that in the new Zone 6 section many of the maps are so small that I don't think they were worth including.<br /><br />I thinks it's worth pointing out that Transit Maps is not designed as a reference guide for travelers to cities around the world but as a celebration of the beauty that is inherent in these colourful diagrams.<br />

Mercator map

This map is the one which almost everyone sees and is good for navigation but is totally incorrect for showing the size of countries and continents. It shows Greenland to be about the same size of Africa when in fact, Africa is 13 times larger.<br /><br />Everyone should look up Peters Projection on the web to realise this.