What do you think?
Rate this book
The Quarantine Atlas: Mapping Global Life Under COVID-19
The Quarantine Atlas is a poignant and deeply human collection of more than 65 homemade maps created by people around the globe that reveal how the coronavirus pandemic has transformed our physical and emotional worlds, in ways both universal and unique. Along with eight original essays, it is a vivid celebration of wayfinding through a crisis that irrevocably altered the way we experience our environment.
In April 2020, Bloomberg CityLab journalists Laura Bliss and Jessica Lee Martin asked readers to submit homemade maps of their lives during the coronavirus pandemic. The response was illuminating and inspiring. The 400+ maps and accompanying stories received served as windows into what individuals around the world were experiencing during the crisis and its resonant social consequences. Collectively, these works showed how coronavirus has transformed the places we live, and our relationships to them.
In The Quarantine Atlas, Bliss distills these stunning submissions and pairs them with essays by journalists and authors, as well as notes from the original mapmakers. The result is an enduring visual record of this unprecedented moment in human history. It is also a celebration of the act of mapping and the ways maps can help us connect and heal from our shared experience.
In April 2020, Bloomberg CityLab journalists Laura Bliss and Jessica Lee Martin asked readers to submit homemade maps of their lives during the coronavirus pandemic. The response was illuminating and inspiring. The 400+ maps and accompanying stories received served as windows into what individuals around the world were experiencing during the crisis and its resonant social consequences. Collectively, these works showed how coronavirus has transformed the places we live, and our relationships to them.
In The Quarantine Atlas, Bliss distills these stunning submissions and pairs them with essays by journalists and authors, as well as notes from the original mapmakers. The result is an enduring visual record of this unprecedented moment in human history. It is also a celebration of the act of mapping and the ways maps can help us connect and heal from our shared experience.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
224 pages, Hardcover
Published April 19, 2022
4 people are currently reading
158 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 14, 2022
This coffeetop book has been well written and formatted for easy reading. It is an accumulation of individual's interpretation of a map showing how their lives changed for work/play/childcare/exercise/entertainment during the Covid-19 pandemic. I thoroughly enjoyed reading/looking at the included maps that individuals from all over the globe drew with their brief descriptions. Some people's world became extremely small while others ventured out more. The essays submitted were insightful and thought provoking. One quote that you often heard during the pandemic was, "we're all in this together," but oh my, how different the pandemic affected us all in more ways than one. Many suffered loss of a loved one, jobs, connections with friends and relatives, as well as closure of businesses that may never reopen. Some people gained financially and others hit rock bottom. There were challenges depicted in some of the maps that people endured, I felt sadness but there was also joy many discovered in nature or kindness from strangers. When you think of asking someone to draw a map, you can't even fathom how wide the word "map" opens the creativity of many until you spend quality time reading this awesome book. What a great gift idea too.
May 30, 2022
We all have our own map that tells the story of our COVID-19 experience. The Quarantine Atlas, by Laura Bliss, will help you appreciate how your story intersects and lives alongside those of the billions of others who charted their own course through the depths and heights of this collective human experience.
My map starts, like so many others, during the first week of March, 2020. I was on a business trip from my home in San Francisco to Boston, when “Corona” began creeping into the periphery of my little worldview. Newscasts of initial cases on the TVs in the airport. Overheard conspiracies at the bar. An infected cruise ship steaming towards the San Francisco Bay. It all began to take the shape of a storm building strength and momentum on the horizon.
I was observing focus groups for my job, and trying to keep my own focus on my work. But the coughs and sniffles on the other side of the one-way mirror began to dominate my attention. I soon found myself pretending to listen while poring over news reports of lockdowns in China and cases spreading within nursing homes in Washington. When I started the trip, the airport felt normal. By the end of the week, I started to notice masked fliers. They stood out, and I remember wondering “isn’t that a bit much?”. But when I sat down for my flight home, I followed the lead of the passenger next to me as we both carefully wiped down our seats and trays.
I landed to news that the hotel I was meant to stay at back in Boston was the site of the Biogen superspreader event. I opened my inbox to an email from my employer asking people to stay home. And I immediately headed to the grocery store to stock up on two weeks of food — noticing that the salad bar was still disconcertingly untouched at 9pm, when it should have been picked over.
As I devoured The Quarantine Atlas, I found myself drawing a mental map of an anxious descent into my own version of quarantine. And I was struck again and again by the weight of this epochal event as I studied the thoughtfully curated collections of maps and read the evocative essays. I felt sad for those who were lost. I felt grateful for my own privilege and good fortunate that kept me employed and infection free.
As Laura Bliss so eloquently wrote in her introduction, The Quarantine Atlas is a “multi-paned window into how the virus transformed our outer and inner landscapes. Born of the twilight hours the world spent at once together and apart, the sum of its parts makes a collective work of art.” The 65 maps and 11 essays are thoughtfully and expertly assembled to form a time capsule of human experience. A moment in time when the world seemed to shrink and the future faded into uncertainty.
Most powerfully, this work of art manages to capture a collective view with representation from all walks of life from all over the world. It’s remarkable that such a tight curation of maps and essays has the power to evoke something so full-spectrum, truly a kaleidoscope of human experience.
The Quarantine Atlas is an essential and timeless touchstone for one of the most important events of our lives. Read it for its ability to reflect your own experience, and cherish it for its power to illicit empathy for the many different worlds that intersect with your own. Thank you to the authors and mapmakers for creating this.
My map starts, like so many others, during the first week of March, 2020. I was on a business trip from my home in San Francisco to Boston, when “Corona” began creeping into the periphery of my little worldview. Newscasts of initial cases on the TVs in the airport. Overheard conspiracies at the bar. An infected cruise ship steaming towards the San Francisco Bay. It all began to take the shape of a storm building strength and momentum on the horizon.
I was observing focus groups for my job, and trying to keep my own focus on my work. But the coughs and sniffles on the other side of the one-way mirror began to dominate my attention. I soon found myself pretending to listen while poring over news reports of lockdowns in China and cases spreading within nursing homes in Washington. When I started the trip, the airport felt normal. By the end of the week, I started to notice masked fliers. They stood out, and I remember wondering “isn’t that a bit much?”. But when I sat down for my flight home, I followed the lead of the passenger next to me as we both carefully wiped down our seats and trays.
I landed to news that the hotel I was meant to stay at back in Boston was the site of the Biogen superspreader event. I opened my inbox to an email from my employer asking people to stay home. And I immediately headed to the grocery store to stock up on two weeks of food — noticing that the salad bar was still disconcertingly untouched at 9pm, when it should have been picked over.
As I devoured The Quarantine Atlas, I found myself drawing a mental map of an anxious descent into my own version of quarantine. And I was struck again and again by the weight of this epochal event as I studied the thoughtfully curated collections of maps and read the evocative essays. I felt sad for those who were lost. I felt grateful for my own privilege and good fortunate that kept me employed and infection free.
As Laura Bliss so eloquently wrote in her introduction, The Quarantine Atlas is a “multi-paned window into how the virus transformed our outer and inner landscapes. Born of the twilight hours the world spent at once together and apart, the sum of its parts makes a collective work of art.” The 65 maps and 11 essays are thoughtfully and expertly assembled to form a time capsule of human experience. A moment in time when the world seemed to shrink and the future faded into uncertainty.
Most powerfully, this work of art manages to capture a collective view with representation from all walks of life from all over the world. It’s remarkable that such a tight curation of maps and essays has the power to evoke something so full-spectrum, truly a kaleidoscope of human experience.
The Quarantine Atlas is an essential and timeless touchstone for one of the most important events of our lives. Read it for its ability to reflect your own experience, and cherish it for its power to illicit empathy for the many different worlds that intersect with your own. Thank you to the authors and mapmakers for creating this.
October 21, 2022
I followed this project throughout the pandemic and it is great to see how Bliss, from City Lab, pulled different maps together into this Atlas. The different perspectives and personal stories of the pandemic are apparent in ways I never noticed looking at individuals maps over the last few years. This Atlas presents the maps of the various perspectives that give pause to think about the meaning of place at a time when we experienced it so differently.
February 25, 2023
thought this book would be mostly maps and brief writing, but there are pages upon pages of writing about people‘s (somehow dull) personal experiences with the pandemic. That is not what this book was marketed as, and not what I thought it would be. It wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be either, and I skimmed the entire thing because the writing was so unnecessarily lengthy. I appreciate documenting coronavirus things but this was eh
June 6, 2023
A coffee table book in a good way. It was fun to dip in and out. People drew maps and wrote comments about how their worlds shrank during the 2020 COVID pandemic. There are also nine longer essays exploring the global impacts as well as more localized impacts. It's a good reminder of what life was like. It certainly got me thinking and remembering.
June 10, 2023
I keep going back to this book more often than any other because I see myself in all of them. Some of the people's illustrations were so detailed, I hope seeing their work in this book inspires them to publish a whole graphic novel!
Thank you, Laura! This is an invaluable collection!
Thank you, Laura! This is an invaluable collection!
November 5, 2022
fascinating to see how the COVID really took the WORLD in a storm. wholesome yet frightening
February 27, 2023
The essay by Dr. Destiny Thomas was extremely painful and misguided. There are a few redeeming aspects to this book, but I think there is a lot of drivel/filler, too.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews