North, 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.
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.
