Mental Maps by Peter Gould and Rodney White (review)

70 Books occurred in the past and frequently still does occur. For example, in the 17th century the developing technology of pumps stimulated physicists to study low pressure phenomena and Galileo learned much about mechanics from the craftsmen in the shipyards of Venice. In this history, India figures among the countries that felt the impact of the Industrial Revolution that was initiated in Britain. In the author’s view, which will be shared by many, technology took a new and different course after about 1870, a course that in no way had been foreshadowed during the Industrial Revolution of Arkwright and Watt. This new course Britain was not prepared to follow, while Germany and the U.S.A. took the greatest advantage of it. With its excellence in technical education, Germany developed very well in several fields such as organic chemistry and automobile engine technology. Today managers of technology are more interested in machines and equipment than in people and their social problems. Therefore a bewildering array of inventions of little or no benefit to humanity have been produced. The path that technological development should take in future is difficult to map. Nonetheless, Pacey’s book attempts to give certain thoughts and concepts to help one find one’s way through the male of technological ingenuity. Colour 73:Second Congress International Colour Association, York, July 1973.Adam Hilger, London, 1973. 566 pp.. illus. This book is a collection of seven survey lectures and abstracts of over 100 papers presented at the 2nd Congress of the International Colour Association held at the University of York. 2-6 July 1973. (A report on the Congress appears in Leorrarrlo 7, 243 ( 1974).) Among the seven survey lectures, those that would be of interest to Leorrardo readers are Current Developments in Colorimetry by Gunter Wyszecki. The Practical Application of Light and Colour to Human Environments by Faber Birren and Colour Discrimination Processes in the Retina by E. F. MacNichol et al. Many papers were given on recent studies and developments in colour vision, colour difference determination and colour measurement. A paper by M. P. Wassall and W. D. Wright describes a spectrophotometerunit that they designed for measuring the fading of paintings in the National Gallery in London. There were two papers on colour education and two on colour in art. Mental Maps. Peter Gould and Rodney White. Penguin, Harmondsworth, England, 1974. 204 pp., illus. Paper. 75p. Reviewed by Lowry Burgess* ‘By weighing we know what things are light and what heavy. By measuring we know what things are long and what short. The relation of all things may be thus determined, arid it is of’ Ereatest irrrportairce to rneasure the niotions of the iriirrr/. I beg your majesty to measure it’ [Mencius (c. 335 BC)). The authors in this book systematically explore a single question: where do you want to live? They begin from the position that each person’s mental preference map is unique and proceed to demonstrate how and by what techniques spacial generalizations can be generated and mapped. Then spacial preference studies carried out in Britain, Sweden, Nigeria. the U.S.A. and other countries are discussed. Important educational and moral viewpoints are presented. The authors state that geographers should expend more effort on studies of ‘invisible‘ human landscapes and human geographical behavior. They emphasize that teaching of geography in schools should begin with an understanding of one‘s own place of habitation in order to be able to understand compassionately another’s place. And finally, they stress the need for a broader basis of geographical under- *Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). 40 Massachusetts Ave.. Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A. standing to serve as a foundation for a vision of a larger world in which human problems are seen as part of a connected reality. Their pursuit of the question ’where do you want to live?’ raises such a large number of questions about the relative value of geographic facts and of image formulation that the authors find it difficult to limit themselves to their ccntral question. The maps presented are generally unimaginative and could have been designed better to convey the pertinent...