In May, HarperCollins released the latest work by Simon Winchester titled “The Man Who Loved China” which includes 3 maps by Springer Cartographics. As Publisher’s Weekly describes it:
Joseph Needham (1900–1995) is the man who made China China, forming the West’s understanding of a sophisticated culture with his masterpiece, Science and Civilization in China, says bestselling author Winchester. In a life devoted to recording the Middle Kingdom’s intellectual wealth, Needham, an eccentric, brilliant Cambridge don, made a remarkable journey from son of a London doctor through scientist-adventurer to red scare target. In Winchester’s (The Professor and the Madman) estimable hands, Needham’s story comes to life straightaway. From the biochemist’s arrival in WWII Chongqing (the smells, of incense smoke, car exhaust, hot cooking oil, a particularly acrid kind of pepper, human waste, oleander, and jasmine) to his steely discipline when crafting his research into prose (to an old friend: I am frightfully busy. You come without an appointment, so I am afraid I cannot see you), Winchester plunges the reader into the action with hardly a break. As the author notes in an outstanding epilogue—a swirling 12-page trip through the kaleidoscope of contemporary China—he is at pains to place Needham front and center in our understanding of the nation that now plays such a huge role in American life.
This is the second book we have illustrated for Mr. Winchester.
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It was a distinct honor to be asked to create the map for Michael Crichton’s “Pirate Latitudes.” The completed manuscript was found after his death in November 2008, and is already in the works to become a major motion picture. Like all good pirate stories this one takes place in the Caribbean and along the Spanish Main.
