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The Measure of Manhattan Marguerite Holloway

The Measure of Manhattan von Marguerite Holloway

The Measure of Manhattan Marguerite Holloway

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Zusammenfassung

The first biography of a nineteenth-century genius, the man who plotted Manhattan's famous city grid.

The Measure of Manhattan Zusammenfassung

The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor Marguerite Holloway

John Randel Jr. (1787-1865) was an eccentric and flamboyant surveyor. Renowned for his inventiveness as well as for his bombast and irascibility, Randel was central to Manhattan's development but died in financial ruin. Telling Randel's engrossing and dramatic life story for the first time, this eye-opening biography introduces an unheralded pioneer of American engineering and mapmaking.

Charged with gridding what was then an undeveloped, hilly island, Randel recorded the contours of Manhattan down to the rocks on its shores. He was obsessed with accuracy and steeped in the values of the Enlightenment, in which math and science promised dominion over nature. The result was a series of maps, astonishing in their detail and precision, which undergird our knowledge about the island today. During his varied career Randel created surveying devices, designed an early elevated subway, and proposed a controversial alternative route for the Erie Canal-winning him admirers and enemies.

The Measure of Manhattan is more than just the life of an unrecognized engineer. It is about the ways in which surveying and cartography changed the ground beneath our feet. Bringing Randel's story into the present, Holloway travels with contemporary surveyors and scientists trying to envision Manhattan as a wild island once again. Illustrated with dozens of historical images and antique maps, The Measure of Manhattan is an absorbing story of a fascinating man that captures the era when Manhattan-indeed, the entire country-still seemed new, the moment before canals and railroads helped draw a grid across the American landscape.

The Measure of Manhattan Bewertungen

The Measure of Manhattan offers a fascinating look at a forgotten episode in American history. Marguerite Holloway brings to life the man who in a very real way made New York what it is today. -- Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes From a Catastrophe
With the grid he laid down, John Randel Jr. transformed an island of 18th Century villages into the modern linear city-a mind-boggling achievement in ferociously meticulous surveying that reads, in The Measure of Manhattan, like a wilderness adventure, angry farmers standing in for the wild animals already hunted away. Marguerite Holloway's portrait of the surveyor's surveyor in his cartography-obsessed time shows us how much the physical city has changed and, most importantly, how much it hasn't. -- Robert Sullivan, author of My American Revolution and Rats
As elegant as the maps it celebrates, Marguerite Holloway's lively biography tells the story of the man who pinned a grid to Manhattan. -- Edward Dolnick, author of The Clockwork Universe
This outstanding history of the Manhattan grid offers us a strange archaeology: part spatial adventure, part technical expedition into the heart of measurement itself, starring teams of 19th-century gentlemen striding across the island's eroded mountains and wild streams, implementing a grid that would soon enough sprout skyscrapers and flatirons, Central Park and Fifth Avenue. Marguerite Holloway's engaging survey takes us step by step through the challenges of obsolete land laws and outdated maps of an earlier metropolis, looking for-and finding-the future shape of this immeasurable city. -- Geoff Manaugh - BLDGBLOG
Marguerite Holloway has created an enchanting web of biography and science, as magical as the grid that John Randel devised to give birth to modern Manhattan. -- Andro Linklater, author of Measuring America
This intelligent and entirely riveting account of the brave young man who squared and sculpted Manhattan, and made famous its present street geometry, is every bit as groundbreaking a success as was his own work, two centuries before. Marguerite Holloway has uncovered in the life of John Randel Jr., a quite marvelous tale, and has told it just magnificently. -- Simon Winchester, author of Atlantic and The Map That Changed the World
In gracefully efficient prose, Marguerite Holloway, who heads Columbia University's Science and Environmental Journalism program, gives the reader a vivid sense of the challenges facing Randel, the social context that informed his epic undertaking, and the will and ingenuity that he brought to the task...an enlightening ode to a man who made sense of a budding metropolis. -- Kevin Canfield - The Daily Beast

Über Marguerite Holloway

Marguerite Holloway, the director of Science and Environmental Journalism at Columbia University, has written for Scientific American, Discover, the New York Times, Natural History, and Wired. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children.

Zusätzliche Informationen

GOR005724648
9780393071252
0393071251
The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor Marguerite Holloway
Marguerite Holloway
Gebraucht - Sehr Gut
Gebundene Ausgabe
WW Norton & Co
20130319
384
N/A
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