Maps that show us who we are (not just where we are)

This book shows where a geographical imagination can take you. Judith Schalansky sat poring over maps of the world on the eastern side of Europe’s Iron curtain thinking as a young woman that she would never see the west, let alone these islands and so she wrote a book instead. Most of us will only ever visit most of the world in our imaginations, but as a man (long dead) once said: it’s easy if you try.

We need new maps of the world, explains Ben Hennig in this book. Hennig, a Geographer now based in Iceland, drew all the maps used in the TED talk you have just seen. Ben argues that in a world increasingly influenced by human action and interaction, we still rely heavily on mapping techniques that were invented to discover unknown places and explore our physical environment. Today we need to stretch the map, and in this beautifully illustrated book Hennig shows how it is best done.

You don’t become rich in the world because you have worked hard and the poor are far from lazy. Robert Frank, perhaps the leading contemporary economist of the USA, explains in a light-hearted but extremely readable and entertaining way why luck got most of us to where we are and what we should do because of that - how to give others a little more luck and consideration, and how to learn to have a little less admiration for those who have acquired the most.

The year 2016 marked the 500th anniversary of the idea of Utopia. Alan Marshall chooses 2121 to look forward to because it is sufficiently far away to be sure that we should expect human life on earth to be very different by then. In this beautifully illustrated book, he literally paints imagined images of 100 cities in the future and explains just how much will have to change if we are to survive and thrive.