Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World

'A triumph, a volume of great good sense and imagination which brims with fascinations' SPECTATOR 'A truly original adventure into new ways of exploring what we mean by a sense of place' SIMON JENKINS 'Shows the unexpected side-effects of human-drawn borders' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A wise and thought-provoking series of raids across borders we thought we knew' IAIN SINCLAIR Our world has innumerable boundaries, ranging from the obvious - like oceans and mountain ranges - to the intangible - like subtle differences in language or climate. Most of us cross invisible lines all the time, but rarely do we stop to consider them. Invisible Lines presents 30 such unseen boundaries, intriguing and unexpected examples of the myriad ways in which we collectively engage with and experience the world. From football fans in Buenos Aires to air quality in China, Paris' banlieues to sub-Saharan Africa's Malaria Belt, the invisible boundaries that shape our experiences and existence provide a compelling guide to seeing and understanding our world anew.

About the Author :
Maxim Samson is an adjunct professor at DePaul University in Chicago, specialising in cultural geography and religion. An award-winning educator and researcher from the UK, he holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Leeds and has researched and taught at universities in the US and Indonesia. He is the author of Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts that Define the World and Earth Shapers: How Humans Mastered Geography and Remade the World.

Review :
An illuminating glimpse of the chain reactions of human and physical geography A chance to see the world anew through the eyes of a wonderfully curious new writer A fascinating book ... a truly original adventure into new ways of exploring what we mean by a sense of place A fascinating exploration of the lesser-known and more subtle borders across the earth and the surprising ways in which they shape our lives A triumph, a volume of great good sense and imagination which brims with fascinations Invisible Lines is a fascinating, detailed exploration of the hidden boundaries that carve up the world ... it is a pleasure to accompany Samson to the Malaria Belt, inside eruvim (markers of a single domestic space within which fewer Sabbath regulations apply), or along the border of Portugal to discover why vultures prefer not to cross it. Old worlds enhanced, new worlds exposed and challenged ... a wise and thought-provoking series of raids across borders we thought we knew and others made visible to us, by Maxim Samson's forensic eye, for the first time Utterly engrossing! Samson's literary atlas of the world's unseen boundaries and how they've shaped our lives demands to be read [An] intricately detailed explanation of how each invisible line came to be, as well as what it can tell us about the world and our place within it...a fascinating read The world is a mesh of lines. We don't normally see them, and so we blunder on, unaware of where we really are and missing out on so much. Samson's iconoclastic new geography will make the scales fall from your eyes. A tremendous and important read A journey to the unmarked and unseen borders that shape our world ... a fascinating, extraordinary and insightful exploration of the many boundaries that define us This absorbing book is an accessible and wide-ranging read, built upon erudition, curiosity and careful compilation. It reveals and reflects upon many types of divisions between places - stretching from the Antarctic to the Urals, and from the turfs of passionate soccer fans in Buenos Aires to linguisitic divisions in Brittany, to name but a few Samson's clear and concise writing, his engaging style and the wide range of topics he covers makes Invisible Lines an absorbing study of the boundaries we set to divide and demarcate the physical and cultural worlds and how this affects us in our day-to-day lives Samson is an amiable and knowledgeable guide to the world's countless invisible lines. Sometimes it's hard to detect at ground level, or appearing subjectively draM on a map, their power is nonetheless immense.