This gorgeous volume of maps and essays, ‘born of the twilight hours the world spent at once together and apart,’ is at once at a portrait of that time, an excavation of its contours, and an indelible account—often funny, sometimes sad, always revelatory—of how a microbe changed the ways that humans everywhere relate to place. A treasure.
With vivid, intriguing maps drawn from perspectives both familiar and surprising, The Quarantine Atlas is a fascinating cartographic memoir of how COVID reconfigured the spaces around us. When future historians look back at the geographies of this extraordinary moment, they will almost certainly turn to The Quarantine Atlas as one of the exceptional artifacts of this era. Even if your bookshelves are already full of maps and atlases, this book will offer a provocative and many-voiced reconsideration of how we see ourselves through cartography. It challenges map readers to think about how visual depictions combine fact and feeling, chronicle and argument, partiality and universalism.
“A visual archive of an unprecedented moment of spatial constraint, and the way we lived those limits in our homes, neighborhoods, and cities…. [These] maps show how people channeled their boredom and grief into bursts of creativity.”
— Slate
