 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | Amazon Exclusive: Simon Winchester Reviews The Fourth Part of the World
Simon Winchester studied geology at Oxford and later became an award-winning journalist, and author of more than a dozen books. He has written for The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, and has reviewed books for The New York Times. His bestselling titles include: The Man Who Loved China, The Professor and the Madman, and Krakatoa. The author divides his time between his home in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland. Read Simon Winchester’s exclusive Amazon guest review of The Fourth Part of the World:
Books about obscure and unobvious commercial subjects, written with passion by stylish enthusiasts, have come in recent years to provide us a canon of the most valuable and lasting literature. Toby Lester, who appears to be a master of the language and a man evidently as inquisitive as a ferret, has written a quite wonderful book about something that is, yes, obscure and unobvious commercial--but which is a tale quite vital to anyone interested in knowing the story of this country. It is about the naming of America, and the creation of a document that has been lately and justly called this country's birth-certificate. The document is a map--and so Mr. Lester's book is in essence about cartography, and sixteenth century cartography at that, a specialist's dream. But the tale of the making and then the hiding and the losing and the finding of this extraordinary and very large document--it called the Waldseemüller Map, and it now belongs to the Library of Congress--is sufficiently exciting to be almost unbearably thrilling. And anyone who can make cartography thrill deserves a medal, at the very least. The mapmakers in question were German: Martin Waldseemüller and his poetically-inclined colleague, Mathias Ringmann. Come the beginning of the sixteenth century, and working in southern France these two, like many in the European intellectual world, were beginning to hear rumors that a new continent had lately been found, halfway between Spain and Japan. (This was fifteen years after Columbus, who still had no clue what he had found in 1492--to his dying day he insisted that he had merely found a hitherto unknown piece of Asia.) The rumors swiftly became accepted fact: in the early 1500s the pair came across two printed accounts of the alleged new continent--accounts that were prolix, flamboyant, unreliable and in parts very saucy (there was material relating to the cosmetic self-mutilation, anal cleanliness and sexual practices of the locals) written by a colourful Italian explorer and sorcerer named Amerigo Vespucci. Crucially Vespucci claimed in one of these papers that “on this last voyage of mine…I have discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more numerous peoples than in our Europe, Asia or Africa, and in addition I found a more pleasant and temperate climate than in any other region known to us…” As it happened, the mapmakers had already been commissioned to create a new world map--and so on it, they both agreed after reading Vespucci's accounts, they would now draw this new body of land, and they would give it a name. After some head-scratching they agreed the name should be the feminine form of the Latinised version of Amerigo Vespucci's Christian name: the properly feminine place-nouns of Africa, Asia and Europe would now be joined, quite simply, by a brand-new entity that they would name America. And so, in 1507, their map was duly published; and in large letters across the southern half of the southern continental discovery, just where Brazil is situated today, was the single word: America. It was written in majuscule script, was a tiny bit crooked, curiously out of scale and looking a little last-minute and just a little tentative--but nevertheless and incontrovertibly, it was there. It caught on: a globe published in Paris in 1515 placed the word on both segments of the continent, north and south. The word was published in many books in central Europe--Strasbourg in 1509, Poland in 1512, Vienna in 1520; it was found in a Spanish book in 1520. In Strasbourg, five years later, another book lists 'America' as one of the world's regions and finally, in 1538, Mercator, the new arbiter of the planet's geography, placed the names North America and South America squarely on the two halves of the fourth continent. And with that, the name was secure; and it would never be changed again. Toby Lester has done American history the greatest service by writing this elegant and thoughtful account of the one morsel of cartographic history that would shake the world's foundations. We are told that this is his first book: may we hope that he writes many more, for his is a rare and masterly talent. --SW (Photo © Setsuko Winchester)
Discover the Waldseemüller World Map from The Fourth Part of the World
Click on image to enlarge
Click to discover the Waldseemüller map legend |
This legend highlights an idea that's almost completely forgotten today: that the New World was remarkable to Europeans in 1507 because it lay not just to the west but also to the south. Read more | 
The portrait shown here is an idealized depiction of the ancient Greek sage Claudius Ptolemy. Read more | 
The portrait shown here, an obvious companion to the portrait of Ptolemy to its left, is an idealized portrait of Amerigo Vespucci...Read more | 
Here, printed in block letters on what we know today as Brazil, is the first use of the name America on a map. Read more |
|
Average Customer Rating:  Important...and Fun! Imagine that.... In his new book, The Fourth Part of the World, Toby Lester finds a fulcrum and has levered the Age of Discovery up onto a pedestal where it is seen in new light. As with all such mechanisms, the device is simple: a map. The first map to show the New World surrounded by water, distinct from the three parts of the theretofore-known world. A rare map, only one copy remains of the thousand printed. An iconic map, for it names this new world America.
But in Lester's hands, it becomes much more. In Barbara Tuchman style, the map is central to the end of an era. From Marco Polo to Copernicus; from classical learning to humanism; from the early Christian missions in the east to the great explorers on vaguely charted seas, this is the story of an Age cleverly told with passion, humor and humble scholarship. In Tuchman style too, the story weaves a broad historical epic from the details of everyday life. So much more than history, it's as if you are there.
For his ability to make careful scholarship thrilling, Mr. Lester deserves your attention. Just a great book! The Fourth Part of the World if just a great book to read. It reads as one big adventure, bringing together the discoverers and mapmakers who had sometime to name the places... Interestingly it was probably Matthias Ringmann and not Martin Waldseemüller that was responsable for putting the name "America" on the chart... A fascinating story really, what more to say....! The World As They Knew It: A Historical Perspective Phew, an extensive work by Mr. Lester; it took me a couple of months to finish reading this work. At time compelling to the point that I was mildly neglecting my studies and at others a comfortable tour through history, I thoroughly enjoyed the read. Having said that I do not believe that this is a must read like Mr. Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, although from a geographical history of the world it takes much the same style and readability.
The author traces the history of geography and discovery from a European viewpoint back to the Middle Ages up to the 16th century, referencing styles of mapping, discoverers, scholars and innovators that have brought the European and ultimately world view of our planet to its current state (admittedly the age of discovery continued and refinements were made but the structure was set and what followed consisted in large part in filling in the blanks). Like Bryson, referenced above, Toby Lester does not just recite the facts he tells a story, guessing at motivations and fleshing out the personalities as best he can with the available information.
The volume is annotated with numerous references and an extensive bibliography. It is illustrated throughout with a variety of maps illustrating the art of mapping pertinent to the age being discussed. The only shortcoming of the book is the lack of an index (at the least this is true of the ARC I read, and I hope that the final edition for publication includes one).
My bottom line is that while I enjoy reading history and I recognize that is not a topic on everyone's favorite list, I would recommend this to anyone with a passing interest in maps or the history of discovery. P-) Exploration in the truest sense What is the scale of the world? The first recorded answer to this was in the 3rd century BCE by Eratosthenes, a Alexandrian Greek astronomer/geographer who measured the circumference of the Earth to be 39,375 km (the actual value is 40,075 km-- that's less than 1% error!).
Geography as a discipline, is one which in the post-modern era, has little meaning as compared to ages past. Today, "geography" brings to mind memorizing maps, continents, and locations easily accessible conceptually (and usually, physically) on the well-measured and explored contours of our planet. To a more formal definition, the modern geographer utilizes computer modeling to study the human-environment relationship.
However, in the world of Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and geographers for more than a millennium, contrasting the known size of our world with how little is known of it sets the study of maps and their intrinsic meaning holds a both philosophical and adventurous call. The map, of course, is the original player's guide for ages past; in the truest sense of what a map should do, the proper cartographical guide should be your itenerary, your travel-log, your translator, and your fortune-teller for the journey not yet begun.
The reader cannot truly appreciate a "story of a map" until one readers the first few chapters of Lester's book. Outright, The Fourth Part of the World is the backstory and tale of the the Waldseemüller map, the centerpiece of a 1507 revision of Ptolemy's Geography, which holds the historical distinction of being the first document which (1) recognizes the New World as a separate continent, and not an eastward extension of Asia and (2) identifies this new landmass as "America" for the first time.
While the map itself has its own beginning and ending (curiously disappearing for nearly 400 years) which brings it to the Library of Congress today, the tale behind the map is a sojourn on the scale of centuries which encompasses Western history from the Fall of Rome to the dawn of the Age of Exploration. Set firmly in the Eurocentric mindset of exploration (the Mongols, Songhai, and Arawaks knew just where they lived, thank you very much), the seeds of cartographic expansion begin with the great conquest of Eurasia in the thirteenth century by Genghis Khan.
When the Mongols hit the geopolitical landscape of the 1200s, they changed everything-- a disciplined military force which could strike like a legion and scatter like bandits. Often, the Mongol Empire is associated with Chinese and Central Asian history, but their effects were (for the time) global. Like dominoes from Japan to Ireland, one kingdom's fall affected all those around them until the percolation of the Khan's influence reached the Vatican.
In grade school, the canonical rationale for the beginning of the Age of Exploration was late Medieval trade with the Middle-East; Lester argues, however, that the primary motivator for the eastern reach of Latin Europe was political-- the Turkish expansion in Anatola in the 11th and 12th centuries (which ultimately triggered the Crusades) pressed Greek (Byzantine) Christians too much for Latin Europe's comfort.
While the European conception of the Far East was steeped in mythology and fantasy, they often looked to the East for salvation. The East was the beginning of light and hope, not only a geographic interpretation, but philosophical and religious as well-- theologians of the day saw history as an expansion from east to west, as the sun marches across the sky. The oriens ultima was the Edenic earthly paradise from which the Next Coming, the religious hoped, would arrive to unify the world under their faith. Mythic figures such as Prester John, to save the world to Gog and Magog, to destroy it, inhabited the lands of the silk-worms and long-lived.
Seeking alliance with the growing Empire (a Christian redeemer perhaps?) who seemed to scare the Islamic states threatening Christian Europe, Popes, kings, and adventurers looked to the land of the Great Khan for the future. The mythic figures stopped being those of fantasy, such as Prester John, and began to be flesh-and-blood adventurers such as Marco Polo and Friar William.
Philosophically, the cosmology of the late Medieval era was concise-- the world existed as three major pieces of land (Europa, Africa, Asia) rising out of the watery sphere of the sea. Contrary to what is commonly taught about pre-Columbian thought, it was well-known in Europe since the Classical Era that Earth was in fact a sphere. Jerusalem was the theological and physical center of the world, where the continents essentially met, and the Ptolemaic spheres of the heavens moved above.
As the Latin Europeans sought to fill in the gaps in their three-part world, the Earth as we know it began to unfold for Western culture. Perhaps it is because so much of history post-Columbus is canon in school curriculum, the story of exploration begins to lose a bit of its luster-of-the-unknown when the Genoan Admiral arrives on the scene. Throughout the work, there is a steady progression of storyline from Middle Age philosophers such as Franciscan monks and early Papal emissaries to China to the Portuguese hugging the African coast (enslaving along the way), the lucky wanderers (Christopher Columbus), and shameless self-promoters as Amerigo Vespucci. This narrative weaves an intriguing tapestry of exploration and cultural growth.
Vespucci's journey itself was the Fourth Part which rocked the philosophical grounds of the era. Columbus' "discovery," at its own time, was throught to be a relatively minor success, as many thought that his islands happened to be a second set of Canaries. Sailing to latitudes over 50 degrees south of the equator had put Amerigo's ship at the fabled Antipodes of the Earth, a fourth land to redefine the deep islands of the Atlantic. This expanding world, embraced by the growing humanist movement across Europe exploded the Renaissance, and the first viable attempts in over a thousand years to revive the Roman Empire sprung to life; with this, two German thinkers-- Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann-- proposed a new edition of Ptolemy's world-defining work.
A philosophical work about humankind's literal and theological place on Earth, The Fourth Part of the World is a journey of the mind and spirit as much as it was across the sea. Exploration is a sincerely human endeavor, which has always been more than finding a new land beyond your view, but within oneself. Growth of the soul is always more fascinating than growth of the maps. The heroism of economic and social subjection are not to be glorified as the men who were not the explorers, but the quiet students of cosmology who studied and wrote in the libraries, monasteries, and universities back on the Continent. These philosophers (in the truest sense of the word) drew the new bounds and directions of thought for the coming centuries. To pore over a map is to explore within and without.
And, if you're lucky, you get something named after you.
More reviews at [..] Nick Tap on "The fourth Part of the world" Very interesting book. Very detailed accounting of events that led to the naming of America. Riveting!!! Excellent reading for everyone. Just wish the maps were a bit larger |  |
Select button not working? 
