MapLab: A Map’s Best Storyteller

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Of the handful of writers who treat maps as subjects, it’s not hard to name favorites. Rebecca Solnit’s imaginative series of city atlases is packed with precise observations on what cartography can reveal. The story of the map that stemmed London’s 1854 cholera outbreak and birthed the science of epidemiology reads like a thriller in Steven Johnson’s telling. Hali Felt breathes life and love into her tender biography of Marie Tharp, the under-recognized scientist who mapped the ocean floor.