Evocative ... A slender volume, and while its contents at times feel cherry-picked, it brims with interesting information ... Brotton suggests that something is lost when the cardinal directions don’t guide our movements as they long did. But he establishes that they remain potent in fascinating and surprising ways.
With so much ground to cover, and with a device as mutable and evidently subjective as the compass to lead him, the author has set himself no easy task. His work, and ours, is made easier by the chronological structure of the discrete sections, and to some degree of the book as a whole ... If some passages in Four Points can feel disorienting, that would appear to be the objective — and it’s one that gets its creator to places prior practitioners never did ... The author hits a surprisingly elegiac note as he considers our current fallen state.
Brotton offers what might be framed as a history of the cultural politics of the cardinal directions. The scope of the book is breathtaking ... Faster, travels further, but inevitably sacrifices depth. Let us hope the rich seams the author has opened up are mined by others.
Brotton guides readers through a broad swath of world history as he ponders the many dimensions of the four compass points. Readers who enjoy history, science, and conceptually innovative nonfiction will adore this title.
