About this item

From the New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in 12 Maps, this is the revelatory history of the four cardinal directions that have oriented and defined our place on the globe for millenniaNorth, south, east, and west: almost all societies use these four cardinal directions to orientate themselves and to understand who they are by projecting where they are. For millennia, these four directions have been foundational to our travel, navigation, and exploration, and are central to the imaginative, moral, and political geography of virtually every culture in the world. Yet they are far more subjective - and sometimes contradictory - than we might realize.Four Points of the Compass leads us on a journey of directional discovery. Societies have understood and defined directions in very different ways based on their locations in time and space.