John Davies è un collezionista di mappe britannico la cui fascinazione per la cartografia sovietica è iniziata mentre lavorava in Lettonia nei primi anni 2000. Ora in pensione da una carriera nei Sistemi Informativi, dedica il suo tempo alla scrittura e alla divulgazione su queste mappe uniche. Davies è anche editore di Sheetlines, il Journal della Charles Close Society, incentrato sullo studio delle mappe Ordnance Survey. Il suo lavoro approfondisce l'importanza storica e culturale insita negli sforzi cartografici.
John Davies takes you on his journeys of 60 years travelling through most of Europe and North America, and invites you to share his wonderful train journeys, the great outdoors, inspiring countries and cities, together with a look at the contemporary scene as he sees it.
In Seven Days to Freedom, John Davies shows how the biblical story of Creation is all about liberation and demonstrates how it is relevant to many contemporary concerns, including housing and land-tenure, slavery, climate- change, and education.
From earliest records to the present day in one easy-to-read volume
From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, and London to towns like Pontiac, MI and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories and ports, or more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet feet on the ground. The Red Atlas includes over 350 extracts from these Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.
Yn ymestyn o'r Oesoedd Ia hyd y dwthwn hwn, mae'r gyfrol feistrolgar hon yn olrhain hanes gwleidyddol, cymdeithasol a diwylliannol y rhan honno o'r byd y daethpwyd i'w hadnabod fel Cymru. Dyma'r llyfr sy'n egluro pam, er gwaethaf pawb a phopeth, 'rydym yma o hyd'.