This book is an odd bird. It's a fairly straightforward book on American geography published by the Smithsonian that is written by a playwright, whose bio on the back notes most prominently his authorship of the 1992 film "Housesitter" with Goldia Hawn and Steve Martin, that somehow became a New York Times bestseller and even a History Channel series. The now former playwright, recognizing where is bread is buttered, recently came out with a sequel, "How the States Got Their Shapes Too." It's become a franchise.

That franchise is even stranger when you look at the organization of the book. 50 states and the District of Columbia are organized by alphabetical order, like an encyclopedia, and each state's chapter deals then with that state's Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western borders in a four separate sections. You can't get much more staid and dull than that. The organization also ensures that numerous borders are mentioned numerous times (at least twice for most states), which, at least according to the Goodreads reviews, becomes repetitive for most anyone.

Still, I really enjoyed it. There was so much in here that I didn't mind it being repeated most of the time, and the book does show that every border has a story. Take Nevada, which looks about as dull as dishwater shapewise, but Congress twice moved its Eastern border over one degree of longitude, in 1862 and 1864, when gold was discovered in those areas, mainly to cut off more territory from the burgeoning Mormon colonies in Utah. The territory itself was created in 1861 to cut off the Comstock Lode of silver from those same Mormons. Or take Ohio. The original line specified in the Northwest Ordinance said the state should go from the Southern-most point on Lake Michigan due East, which unfortunately would cut off the growing city of Toledo from the state. So Congress in 1835 put the line on a slant. Michigan, still a territory, objected and sent its militia to seize the lands in question, resulting in the Toledo War. In response to this provocation, Congress gave Michigan the big chunk of land of Wisconsin on the other side of Lake Michigan, which explains why Michigan is divided oddly in half. Those states then battled over that line. The ramifications echoed outward.

There's dozens of such little stories, but a few constants keep coming up. One is how important water access was to these states, in a time when states were more like little countries. Toledo ensured Ohio access to Lake Erie and the mouth of the Maumee River. Pennsylvania's nub on the Northwest ensured it access to Lake Erie too, creating the town of Erie. Likewise the little nubs at the bottom of Mississippi and Alabama, taken from Spain in 1810 and 1813, ensured each state got equal access to the gulf. Also, I had no idea how important the principle of equality of state size was to Congress when it was creating them, enough so that they often looked forward for decades in planning the states. The odd bend between Alabama and Mississippi was drawn to ensure almost complete equality of land between the two. When Congress created Kansas's Southern border on the 37 parallel in 1861, it did so so that it could create exactly three more states of exactly three degrees height each, a process that would take another thirty years to complete (Nebraska, South and North Dakota). Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana were also started on the 37th parallel for the same reason. Many of these same states also have exactly 7 degrees of width, another attempt to ensure equality of size if not population. Finally, I had no idea how many of these disputes carried over from the 18th or 19th century into the 20th, and how many had to be settled by the Supreme Court. It took til 1901 for the Court to settle the Tennessee/Kentucky borderline due to some surveyors' errors over a hundred years before. New Jersey in 1993 won a Supreme Court case against New York for the parts of Ellis Island that had been created by dredging the muck which Jersey had a right to. Some states like Michigan and Wisconsin have never officially agreed to a borderline, even today.

Despite all these interesting facts and stories the question is why this geography book remains so popular. Clearly it is answering a need. The map of the United States is both so ubiquitous in our daily lives and also so inexplicable that people wanted to put some order and narrative into it, and this book does that, in a solid, workmanlike fashion. I'm glad I read it.