Rand McNally Millennium World Atlas (Rand McNally)

Rating:
Summary: A flawed gem
Review: I am a mature student, a recently retired University professor, who has enrolled in a Bachelor's program in Geography. In my search for textbooks I ordered the Millennial Atlas, mainly because it was the most recently published - important in this changing world. There is much to admire in the Millennial Atlas - especially in the introductory section, which is very informative, its content lightened and clarified by superb diagrams. The city maps are also outstanding. But then I found a spelling error on page vi ... and then erroneous coloring of the climate regions map on A-19. It occurred to me that if a new student can spot these errors, what others, more subtle, are there? The maps which form the body of the work are excellent, clearly showing both physical and political features (although I did disagree with some editorial decisions e.g. why make Mauritius, and other inset maps, the same scale as the entire page, thereby radically reducing the detail possible?) But the main disappointment was one of production. Significant strips of all the otherwise superb two page maps, and there are many, are buried in the fold: as an example, on the world maps one has to push and pull to see France; if the student finds it on the map of Europe, then there is a steep paper valley from the Balkans through Poland to Norway, and so on. In their printing and binding, other, older, atlases have for decades avoided this considerable irritation. Reluctantly, I have returned this flawed gem of an atlas.

Rating:
Summary: A voluminous book with good thematic section.
Review: Rand McNally celebrates the new millennium by publishing their Millennium World Atlas, a voluminous book that aims to give an overview of the world at the end of the year 1999. The atlas starts with a large thematic section including a timeline presenting milestone events of the last 1000 years. A wide variety of topics is treated in the 40 pages that follow. The 175 reference maps are mostly reasonably empty with not many roads, and relief shading is not consistent: sometimes it is highly accurate, sometimes it remains very global. Color usage is well-chosen, but the grey relief shading sometimes makes some areas less readable. The emphasis is clearly on North-America with 32% of the reference plates; this is because the U.S.A. is the main target audience for this atlas. To me, the most beautiful part of the atlas are the urban area maps at the large scale of 1:300,000, which are beautifully colored, highly readable, and very informative. The atlas also contains a very large section on population statistics for hundreds of the world's cities. The index-gazetteer contains 92,000 names which is less than average for a world atlas of this size. Still, it's a good overview of the world at the end of this century, and is overall speaking a good publication.