World Enough and Life

LIFE PICTORIAL ATLAS OF THE WORLD (600 pp.)--LIFE and Rand McNally ($30).

An atlas must be a tome, but it need not to be a tombstone. The editors of LIFE and the mapmakers of Rand McNally have produced a popular atlas which is not only larger and glossier than others in its class (it does not compete with such technicians' works as the five-volume, $125 London Times Atlas of the World), but which gives a reader the earth's shape and feel as well as its names and places.

The atlas, which includes a 160-page index, is at its best in its superb relief maps. In addition, each large area of the planet is shown, by means of color photos of a specially built globe, as it would look from a point several hundred miles out in space. The technique gives, for instance, a sense of the almost landless expanse of the Pacific with a vividness that could be duplicated only by taking an ocean voyage or reading Conrad. Throughout the book, geology is used to explain geography. Below the map for Florida, for example, is a diagram demonstrating the formation of a barrier beach. For Maine, the diagram shows how glaciers form eskers, drumlins and kames.

The political maps are sound, if unexceptional. Following State Department protocol, such divided countries as North and South Korea, North and South Viet Nam, East and West Germany, China are shown in one color--since by U.S. policy they are all really single nations. Thus the Cold War's most crucial boundaries end as unobtrusive red lines. And by omitting any map of the old African colonial empires, the atlas fails to dramatize the most important change of the last 15 years in the world's political maps--the breaking up of the old empires into 24 new nations.

The most spectacular features are the handsome, full-page color pictures, closely correlated with the maps. With a turn of the page, the reader gets a quick glimpse of what the mapped terrain really looks like. For Spain, for instance, instead of the customary travel-poster view of a bullfight, there is only one huge photo, spread across two pages--a memorable view of miles of rolling red earth planted with olive trees. Half a dozen postcard-size shots could have been crammed into the space, producing nothing more than a sheaf of postcards.

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