NEW YORK: THE PHOTO ATLAS: An Aerial Tour of All Five Boroughs and More
Getmapping, . . HarperCollins, $60 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-06-059499-2
From thousands of feet up, New York, with its grid of blocks, looks more like a circuit board than a city; its bodies of water more like airbrushed spills than the gigantic moats they in fact are. This giant book is just what it says it is: New York City photographed from space, with accompanying maps that give names to the bleached out, anonymous-looking checkerboards that appear in the photos snaked through with light-looking lines of asphalt—more than 40,000 streets in all. The scale of this 10½" × 14½" book, and its weight, add to the sense of enormity; readers will soon zoom in, however, flipping back and forth between maps containing their favorite blocks or sites and pictures showing them with their surrounding environs. For anyone who has ever pored over an atlas and filled it in with their mind's eye, this city-between-covers will be a wish come true.
Reviewed on: 10/11/2004
Genre: Nonfiction