High mountains, polar expanses, volcanic peaks are exciting and special environments. 13 leading international geographers explore different aspects of these environments - disorientation, exploration, native knowledge, polar research. This is the first book to do this.High places - be they mountain peaks or the vast expanses of the polar latitudes - have always captured the human imagination. Inaccessible, extreme, they are commonly invested with awe and reverence, as places of physical challenge, intense experience. Increasingly, they are also treated as unique locations for science."High Places" explores the fascinating geographies of these special environments, revealing how senses are challenged, objectivities exposed, cultural assumptions laid bare. Whether walking the summit of Pico de Orizaba, the fourth highest volcano in the northern hemisphere; recounting the tale of the American explorer Charles Wilkes, charged with 'immoral mapping' in Antarctica; or exploring the 200,000 year old Greenland ice core; the international contributors reveal the richness and significance of these unique locations. Embracing Europe, Asia, North and Central America, Antarctica and the Arctic, "High Places" will interest geographers, historians of science, and those interested in polar/mountain studies, landscape, culture and environment.

The Iconography of Landscape draws together fourteen scholars from diverse disciplines to explore the status of landscape as a cultural image. By applying the art-historical method of iconography--interpreting levels of meaning in human artifacts--to landscapes on paper or canvas, in literary form or on the ground, its contributors show how landscape is an important mode of human signification, informed by, and itself informing social, cultural and political issues. The range of examples is wide in terms of medium, period and place. It covers poetry and promotional literature, architectural design and urban ceremonial maps and paintings; the historical periods discussed range from sixteenth-century Italy to twentieth-century Canada. The book is introduced by the editors' discussion of the meanings of landscape and of the iconographic method in the context of contemporary theoretical and methodological debate on culture and society.

"Earthbound humans are unable to embrace more than a tiny part of the planetary surface. But in their imagination they can grasp the whole of the earth, as a surface or a solid body, to locate it within infinities of space and to communicate and share images of it."--from the Preface

Long before we had the ability to photograph the earth from space--to see our planet as it would be seen by the Greek god Apollo--images of the earth as a globe had captured popular imagination. In "Apollo's Eye, " geographer Denis Cosgrove examines the historical implications for the West of conceiving and representing the earth as a globe: a unified, spherical body. Cosgrove traces how ideas of globalism and globalization have shifted historically in relation to changing images of the earth, from antiquity to the Space Age. He connects the evolving image of a unified globe to politically powerful conceptions of human unity.

Leading geographer Denis Cosgrove provides a series of personal reflections on the complex connections between seeing, imagining and representing the world geographically. In a series of eloquent essays he draws upon pictorial images - including maps, sketches, cartoons, paintings, and photographs - to explore and elaborate upon the many and varied ways in which the vast and varied earth, and at times the heavens beyond, have been both imagined and represented as a place of human habitation. The essays include reflections upon geographical discovery; urban cartography and utopian visions; ideas of landscape and the shaping of America; wilderness and masculinity; conceptions of the Pacific; and the imaginative grip of the Equator. Extensively illustrated, this engaging work reveals the richness of the geographical imagination as expressed over the past five centuries.