Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way by Maxim Samson homemade Letts captures both the personalities

Letts captures both the personalities and the stakes of this daring mission with such a sharp ear for drama that the whole second half of the book reads like a WWII thriller dreamed up by Alan Furst or Len Deighton

From the get-go she was a spitfire

heat embossing

Alongside Maria Nilsson's green-ink illustrations

In Donald Worster's magisterial biography

Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way by Maxim Samson homemade Letts captures both the personalitiesThe globetrotting story of how humans have harnessed the geographical landscape and written ourselves onto our surroundings. Mountains, meridians, rivers, and borders these are some of the features that divide the world on our maps and in our minds. But geography is far less set in stone than we might believe, and, as Maxim Samson's Earth Shapers contends, in our relatively short time on this planet, humans have become experts at fundamentally