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A Mapmaker's Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice |
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A Mapmaker's Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice
List Price: $14.45
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Manufacturer: Sceptre
Author: James Cowan
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 1998-07-16
Publisher: Sceptre
Label: Sceptre
Number Of Pages: 162
Features:
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Editorial Review:
In an island monastery, a cloistered monk experiences the adventure of a lifetime. News of Fra Mauro's attempt to make a perfect map spreads, and explorers, pilgrims, travellers and merchants are all eager to share their accounts of far-away lands, making him question the nature of reality itself.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Deserving of a place on every community library fiction shelf.  2008-05-04
The world is more than just a collection of continents and nations, as map maker Fra Mauro discovers in "A Mapmaker's Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice". Desiring to create the first map of the entire Earth, he sends out a call for information about the strange and far corners of the world. What he gets is more than objective words of what is at every bit of longitude and latitude. Highly recommended for historical fiction enthusiasts and deserving of a place on every community library fiction shelf.
A KEEPER 2008-01-25
I truly enjoyed this book and put it on my "Read Again Shelf" (there aren't many there). Fra Mauro is a great character - I wanted to be a fly on the wall to actually see him at his work.
I think several of the reviewers took this book too seriously. I spread out the reading of this over a couple of weeks rather than reading it straight through.
Merely clever, not engaging, because inauthentic vehicle  2003-01-07
Cowan is a talented wordsmith and has fascinating trivia to explore. Having chosen a Renaissance monk as his voice, however, he should have made some effort to identify, authenticate, justify that personality and worldview. The reader needn't be an antiquarian nor a theologian to be irritated by this supposedly dedicated Christian scholar being so entirely self-referencing and self-absorbed. So much Asian mysticism and 20th century psychobabble are anachronistic. This author needs a good editor and a better thread or theme on which to exercise his talent.
Personal Fave But With a Big Flaw 2002-10-08
is exceedingly difficult to review since my feelings toward it are so ambivalent. If I were to judge a book by its cover I'd give this all-time-favorite status.
Design and construction (in the cloth edition) are beautifully rendered, with a brevity and diminutive size that adds to the appeal. The way it deals with obscure esoteric historical matters increases irresistibility for someone with my interests. I'd love to give it "must read" approbation, but unfortunately things aren't so simple. There are two reasons why. First the excusable one: it doesn't play out like a traditional novel; there isn't much of a plot to speak of. But this is not an accident I believe, given
the Nominalist philosophical view implied by the book's narrative voice, which forms the
second flaw. And it is not excusable. Nominalism holds that reality is "all in your mind."
A can be B can be C, etc. Nothing is really what you think it is. Most people know a falsehood when they see it, and this one is as destructive as they come! It is however the explicit philosophical view of many 20th century intellectuals, most notably Umberto Eco, as illustrated in the protagonist of his famous novel, . What becomes starkly clear
is the reason WHY the book is no traditional novel: for in a situation where nothing can be defined for certain, a novel (or anything) can be whatever you want it to be........ It is thus with considerable trepidation that I observe , a work of salient charm, but false underlying premises.
Boring and Pretentious 2002-03-16
Not my cup of tea. I really REALLY wanted to like it, but I could not. Too slow, too earnest for its own good. Cowan writes nice words but strung together, they create a series of pieces that seem to make the author appear to jump up and down saying "look at me! Look how smart I am!"
Sorry, just didn't take.
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