The Daily Telegraph reviews The Fourth Part of the World, the new book on the Waldseemüller map by Toby Lester: “Just telling the story of the invention of the name, the creation of the map, its disappearance, and its eventual discovery, would make an interesting book. But Toby Lester, an American journalist with a voracious intellectual appetite, has done much more than that. He starts and ends with the map itself; in between, he packs in an extraordinary amount of information about the growth of geographical knowledge from the ancient world to the Renaissance.” The review concludes: “This is a very impressive book: always user-friendly but never dumbed-down and covering an extraordinary range of subject matters. The best popular book on cartography, in fact, since Nicholas Crane’s Mercator; and that is high praise indeed.”

Previously: Updates on Two New Books; The Fourth Part of the World.

• Buy The Fourth Part of the World at Amazon.com