Check out Michael Washburn’s excellent review of Toby Lester’s The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America Its Name in the Boston Globe. Mike finds The Fourth Part of the World an “odd, recursive” work, presenting “more of an intellectual detective story than a doctrinaire history.”
The generalist nature of his approach allows Lester to effectively dramatize the simultaneity of history—how many different actors all struggle toward the same goal without knowledge of their peers’ efforts. In our standardized age, it’s pleasantly jarring to realize that until recently the contours of the world adhered most strongly to an individual’s personal exploration. This assemblage of thumbnail history has limitations, of course, and “The Fourth Part of the World’’ sacrifices exactitude in order to spin a good yarn. For the most part, this enthusiasm for narrative more than compensates for the periodic lack of comprehensiveness, but Lester’s leveling approach does have one outstanding drawback.
You can access the entire piece here, and enjoy tasty snippets like this sprinkled throughout: “Suffice it to say that Copernicus gazed upon the map laid before him and, buried in the contradictions of its history, saw a way forward, the future held present in the past.”
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