The Map of the World: The Absent Truth

For centuries a map born from a sailor's need hung on the walls of schools and halls of decision: the projection Gerardus Mercator devised to give ships a straight line across the ocean, and this short book tells what that straightness did to the truth. Lands far from the equator swelled on paper while the equatorial continents shrank, so that Greenland seemed to rival Africa, and when Greenland asks the Map why it looks the size of a whole continent, the Map answers only with silence. Africa, speaking through the African Union, asks for no new land, only to be seen as it truly is, and France announces that it will abandon the old map. As it is slowly folded away, the old map says it did not choose its own size, and Science declares that it is a measure that refuses to inflate any people at the expense of another. The book ends with the conviction that reversing an error is a virtue and that correcting a map corrects the image of the world in the minds of generations to come.