This Way Up

You know the Men, and you know the maps from those zany, self-deprecating and terribly witty YouTube videos. Does the format work in printed form? A qualified “yes” is the answer based on the paperback issue that I picked up in the Waterstones “Buy one get one half price” sale. This is mostly an easy, breezy read, with lots of side comments, footnotes and footnotes to the footnotes and is almost always amusing, even sometimes actually funny. Each chapter covers a different map-related topic, some widely known, others less so. Our presenters try to keep things interesting by adopting different styles for some of the chapters. These mostly work but the podcast script and annotations that went on for two chapters about the Donner party didn’t really work for me. The style was laboured, unfunny and the map-adjacent material in the Donner story wasn’t really enough and ended up stretched rather thinly. Despite that, however, I did enjoy the rest of the book, finishing it just a few days…