In his classic text, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner John Noble Wilford recounts the history of cartography from antiquity to the space age.
They are among the world's great pioneers and adventurers: the mapmakers who for centuries have been expanding our knowledge of who and where we are, and where we want to go. From the surprisingly accurate silk maps prepared by Chinese cartographers in the second century B.C., to medieval mapmakers who believed they had fixed the location of paradise, through to the expeditions of Columbus and Magellan, John Noble Wilford chronicles the...

This collection is a guide to the history of the universe for ordinary mortals, concerning such subjects as the birth and death of stars, black holes, the nature of the solar system and big bang theory. Notes at the beginning of each chapter put each report in context.

An updated edition of the classic history of cartography, this work traces the adventures, discoveries and feats of technical ingenuity by which mapmakers, over the centuries, have succeeded in charting first the surface of the globe, then the earth's interior and the ocean floors, and finally the moon and the planets of our solar system. This edition includes three new chapters, as well as many updates and amplifications, to reflect the great changes that have taken places in mapmaking in the past two decades.

The astronomer Percival Lowell envisioned a world threaded by canals and peopled by ancient, intelligent beings. The Viking spacecraft showed us a seemingly sterile planet with a salmon-pink sky and sub-Antarctic temperatures. In this swiftly paced and authoritative book, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer traverses the vast physical and cognitive distances between Earth and Mars and between Lowell s Mars and Viking s while offering an informed vision of the future of Martian exploration. Mars Beckons is a fascinating synthesis of myth, history, politics, and high technology,...