Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas

About this book

The acclaimed geographer Denis Wood has written numerous books (including the influential bestseller The Power of Maps) that reorient his readers to our neighborhoods homes and bodies. At the heart of Woods investigations is a near-legendary endeavor: the Boylan Heights maps begun in 1982 and first presented in Everything Sings (2010). Surveying his century-old half-square mile neighborhood Boylan Heights in Raleigh North Carolina Wood began by paring away the inessential map crap (scale orientation street grids) then found elegant ways to represent such phenomena as radio waves permeating the air the light cast by street lights and Halloween pumpkins on porches. As radio host Ira Glass writes in his introduction to this volume we see which homes have wind chimes and which ones call the cops. We see the route of the letter carrier and the life cycle of the daily paper. Wood is writing a novel where we never meet the main characters but their stuff is everywhere.