Man, I read weird things. This one’s on the Age of Discovery, again, and also mapmaking. 

Lester is really presenting two stories that intersect: the story of European exploration between the 1200s and 1500, and the story of European map making. While they meet in places before, they really collide with the 1507 Waldseemüller map, a German map that was the first to name the New World “America”.

How this happens is a story well worth the price of the book (that I’ve now freaked TWO friends out with), but Lester goes above and beyond by providing context to why medieval maps contain some of the things they did (e.g. garden of Eden, men with the heads of dogs, Prester John) and all-too-brief digressions into details of some of the expeditions.

10/10 would recommend to massive nerds