Large Print in The Books Store

Like countless other readers, Miles Harvey, a writer for Outside magazine, encountered the news of Bland's arrest as a brief item in the back pages of the morning newspaper. The story stayed with Harvey, who wondered why otherwise law-abiding people behave so badly around antiquities. In The Island of Lost Maps, a wonderfully rich excursion into the demimonde of what might be called cartographomania, Harvey follows Bland's tracks from library to library, reconstructing the crimes of the man he deems the Al Capone of map theft, following the contours of Bland's complex, sinister character. Along the way, Harvey examines the history of cartography generally, and the ravenous market for old maps--once the quiet province of a few knowing collectors, now invaded by speculators. These maps are just another corner of the overpriced status-symbol commodity market--and one that richly rewarded Bland's nefarious work.

As a young man, writes his namesake and grandson in his introduction, Churchill toured some of the battlefields of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and it is in writing of these two epochs and the expansionist years between them that Churchill is strongest. Of particular interest are his remarks on the ideological origins of the colonial revolution in such documents as the Magna Carta and the teachings of the Puritan elders, although, as an eminently practical politician, Churchill gives attention to less lofty causes of dissent--for instance, the English crown's logistical difficulty in governing an overseas empire with ideas of governance and resources of its own. Churchill's reflections on the Second World War are also of much value, and he provides an insider's view of the defeat of Nazism and the birth of the cold war.