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Atlas of Remote Islands

Judith Schalansky,

Christine Lo (Translator)

4.25 · Rating details · 3,553 ratings · 505 reviews

A rare and beautifully illustrated journey to fifty faraway worlds.

There are still places on earth that are unknown. Visually stunning and uniquely designed, this wondrous book captures fifty islands that are far away in every sense-from the mainland, from people, from airports, and from holiday brochures. Author Judith Schalansky used historic events and scientific repor ...more

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Hardcover, 144 pages

Published September 28th 2010 by Penguin (first published 2009)

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May 15, 2014 B Schrodinger rated it it was amazing

Shelves: maps, history, geography, the-ocean

On a wonderfully warm and cloudless winter solstice day I took this volume on a picnic and was engrossed for a few hours with the beautiful maps and the equally beautiful stories that accompanied them. While Judith Schalansky proves to be another of my fellow map nerds along with Simon Garfield and Ken Jennings, Judith's history has a unique slant on the usual type of nerdery.

Judith grew up in East Germany during the late 80's and early 90's. So her primary school years were filled with communis ...more

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Dec 21, 2010 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: All dreamers, travelers, and writers

Shelves: cold-weather-islands, read2011, favorites

I would give this book 10 stars if I could. I wish it was twice as long. It has a beautiful introduction full of thoughts on travel and what it is that draws people to remote places. The majority of the book is two-page segments where the island's map is on one side and the other has basic information on it (when it was "discovered," how many people inhabit it, important moments in its history) as well as a narrative. That was my favorite part. It might have a legend, a historical moment, a disc ...more

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Dec 14, 2014 Mir rated it really liked it

Shelves: travel, non-fiction

This is the anti-travel book. You've never been to these places, and if you know what's good for you, you never will. The author has never seen them, either. In fact, hardly any living person has been to these spots, and with good reason.

...more

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Dec 30, 2010 Tony rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science-nature, obscure-but-cool

It came in a box with another book and a CD, delivered to my front porch and awaiting me Friday night. At first look, it seemed scant. A large-type introduction, as if to exaggerate the number of pages. Some maps of islands with brief written observations on the facing page. I read a few. Cute, but I was already in the middle of a novel I was really enjoying and this could wait on a coffee table, where maybe it would belong.

Came Saturday morning, and the novel stood next to the Atlas. My hand fl It came in a box with another book and a CD, delivered to my front porch and awaiting me Friday night. At first look, it seemed scant. A large-type introduction, as if to exaggerate the number of pages. Some maps of islands with brief written observations on the facing page. I read a few. Cute, but I was already in the middle of a novel I was really enjoying and this could wait on a coffee table, where maybe it would belong.

Came Saturday morning, and the novel stood next to the Atlas. My hand flexed, like a divining rod, and picked up the Atlas. And I barely put it down again until I traveled around the world.

Fifty remote islands. Mostly uninhabited. One where people never walked. One where, until the 1990s, fewer people had trod than on the moon. Some where only bones remain. Yet, one has been inhabited for 3,000 years, the thousand residents following an extreme form of zero population growth. Some can not yield vegetation. One, thanks to massive bird droppings, is pure phosphate. On another, inbreeding has caused 10 per cent of the 250 inhabitants to be color blind; and they prefer it so. Children born on another island die within eight days. One will sink into the ocean forever, maybe next month, maybe next year; you can still go there if you are not a researcher or a missionary. One was the stage for a notorious murder. These islands gave an ephemeral glance of the Transit of Venus, watched Amelia Earhart fly to her death, and hosted the Bounty's mutiny. On one, six soldiers raised a flag. There are songs and sex. The New Zealand Department of Conservatism sends nine volunteers for six month stays on another island with no other inhabitants; climbing skills and practical experience in maintaining buildings an advantage (Address for applications included). In this book you will find the ends of the earth and its navel.

Every island has a story. Yes, Atlas of Remote Islands is a slim volume, but every sentence is perfect. Fraulein Schalansky has been flawlessly translated. This book will indeed have a home on my coffee table, not because it is voluptuous, but because I will re-read it often and will want it handy.

I will not read a cooler book this year.

One thing about the Atlas befuddles me though. It is subtitled: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will. What? How can you write a book like this and not want to go there? Never? Really?

Memo to self: I know what you're thinking. You want to go to all 50 islands before you die. You can't. Some are physically impossible. Some would be too expensive. And, anyhow, you don't have enough time left. But, you should go to at least one of them before you die. And recommend just such a trip to those on your friend list who like to travel and prefer an adventure. Pukapuka is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and has 600 inhabitants. Surely one of them would have a cold beer for an old pilgrim.

Memo to others: The CD that came in the box was Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons. It proved, coincidentally, to be the perfect soundtrack for reading this book! ...more

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Feb 15, 2016 Thomas Strömquist rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Thomas by: Isidora

The mouse-over tooltip for five stars here on Goodreads reads "it was amazing" and seldom have I come across a book to fit the bill better. I was blown away by this wonderful atlas of islands already during the foreword. The imagery of the author at eight, traveling the world by tracing a route with her finger in her atlas and her mother advising her to "take the Panama canal, that's the shortest route" is powerful and very vivid. She brought her fascination with maps, atlases and islands in par The mouse-over tooltip for five stars here on Goodreads reads "it was amazing" and seldom have I come across a book to fit the bill better. I was blown away by this wonderful atlas of islands already during the foreword. The imagery of the author at eight, traveling the world by tracing a route with her finger in her atlas and her mother advising her to "take the Panama canal, that's the shortest route" is powerful and very vivid. She brought her fascination with maps, atlases and islands in particular with her into adulthood. Her descriptions, insights and unique views of them moved and fascinated me and I don't think I will ever look at an atlas the same way again.

The foreword was, as it should, just an introduction to things to come. Each island is presented with a few base facts, a page of text - often a historical account and then another page with a map. The stories are carefully chosen and gives just enough to invoke imagination, fascination, thrill or possibly dread. But that's not all! Often the laconic facts are enough to get the mind spinning; sometimes we're given a story of a village and society a hundred years ago, or two hundred years ago but when eyes fall upon the short facts, it says "uninhabited" or we learn of an island being abandoned or evacuated a long time ago and the same row states "4 residents" and my mind reels. Why? Who are they? What happened?

Here are islands with abandoned research stations, islands where half of the newborns succumbed to the "8-day sickness" in the late 1800's, islands with legends of buried treasures, islands where ships cannot make port. Where 120 million crabs reside and migrate to the sea at a given time of the year, horrible penal colony sites. Islands where a large number of the inhabitants are truly colorblind, where shipwrecked has built colonies, islands where cultures have blossomed and then vanished. Easter Island, Bear Island, the island never found by Amelia Earhart. And Antipodes Island, where the discoverer in 1800 realized that he was almost exactly opposite Greenwich and therefore as far away from home as he could be while still on the planet. And every route home was equally long. Actually, none of the 50 islands will leave you indifferent.

Wonderful book and very highly recommended.

Deception Island ...more

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Jul 28, 2011 gwayle rated it it was ok

This book drove me crazy. The author includes fifty islands, most unfamiliar to a general audience (Iwo Jima and Easter Island are the only ones I recognized). Each spread includes information like the island's name, area, number of residents, etymology of the name, parent country, distance from other locations, timeline of major events, a small map of where island is in relation to major continents, and a larger map of the island itself. The brief text that accompanies this is liable to go in a ...more

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Nov 25, 2017 Andrea rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, around-the-world-2017, personal-challenge-2017, challenge

Written, designed and even typeset by the author, this is an exquisite little book to read. In terms of content, I think it is compelling in a car-crash kind of way; disturbing and at times horrific, but difficult to turn away from. Some of the stories I was familiar with, and I've even visited one of these fifty remote islands, but overall I agree with the author who says in her introduction what I found on my journey were not models of romantic, alternative ways of living, but islands one migh ...more

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Jan 14, 2016 Kirstine rated it really liked it

Shelves: r-2016, own, 1-women, translated, non-fiction, reviewed

This is genuinely a delightful book. And it’s such an original concept. I mean, how often do you think of islands? Really think of islands? Not very often? Me either.

Judith Schalansky however, has thought about islands a lot, and she shares it with the world in this beautiful book. Each island takes up two pages, one with a small description and one with a simple, but wonderful illustration of the island. The description is not a description per se, it’s more a selected story about the island i This is genuinely a delightful book. And it’s such an original concept. I mean, how often do you think of islands? Really think of islands? Not very often? Me either.

Judith Schalansky however, has thought about islands a lot, and she shares it with the world in this beautiful book. Each island takes up two pages, one with a small description and one with a simple, but wonderful illustration of the island. The description is not a description per se, it’s more a selected story about the island itself, a piece of its history or a story that relates to the island in some way.

I know that islands exist, of course, but I had no idea that so many of them were so inaccessible, or that some of them have got such a rich, weird, grotesque or down right horrible history. I just love it, I love hearing about these weird, odd details about the world, that there exists places we'd be hard pressed to access, we've been to the moon for godssake, but some of these islands? Of course we probably won't put in the effort, considering we might not find anything interesting, but some of these stories certainly tell you otherwise.

Some of the stories Schalansky shares are incredible in their awfulness or ridiculousness. Some of these islands contain so much mystery, and events we’ll never learn the truth of. Some of them have inhabitants and societies with rules, laws and norms that directly defy what we think is right, or thought possible. There’s Tikopia, for instance, with a population of 1200 and not more, because this is the number of people the island can feed. Population control was of utmost importance and apparently involved people voluntarily killing themselves, killing babies if they knew they couldn’t feed them down the line, celibacy etc. I don’t think they do this anymore, but still. Holy shit. There’s the Floreana island, where a school teacher and a dentist moved to live alone and naked (it would seem), then another woman and two of her lovers arrived as well and this new woman terrorizes the island. Everyone ends up dead, but the schoolteacher who returns to the mainland, the skeleton of one of them is found on an entirely different island; no one knows what happened. Some of it is downright unbelievable. There’s a story about a boy who learns a language through dreams that’s only spoken on a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean where he’s never been. Some guy gets eaten by penguins? It’s incredible.

The stories go from descriptive, to be about historical events, recent events, events that are curious, mysterious, events we recognize, or it’s things we, most likely, have no idea ever took place. Schalansky captures what it is that makes islands, to her, so captivating and interesting. They’re vastly different, there are islands from all over the world, with different nature, size, animals, accessibility, histories. One island had had, until recently, less people on it than there had been on the moon. It’s such a delightful way to show how odd and weird and incredible the earth is. And islands, in their isolation, in their disregard for what happens all over the rest of the world, feel removed, foreign and strange, it’s seeing earth in a new way, a reminder that there’s so much that’s wild, untamed, untouched and mysterious on this planet still.

I wish she’d been more precise in the descriptions sometimes. She could have added a few dates to let us know if the story is new or old, and sometimes the stories were a little sparse on information, making it difficult to figure out exactly what she was trying to tell. I always would have liked her to include, in a few instances, more about the actual island and not just some vaguely related story (they were still interesting stories though). All island illustrations also had these yellow markings, but nowhere is it described what they're for. Sometimes you can figure it out, sometimes not, so maybe that should have been added.

But my critique is minimal, and honestly, it’s a beautifully illustrated book of 50 islands with peculiar, fascinating stories. Definitely the sort of book you’d like for your coffee table. Or if you want islands to be cool again. Or if you like maps, islands or pretty books. It's honestly very versatile. ...more

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Oct 06, 2014 ^ rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Those with a sense of curiosity

Shelves: islands, books-with-1001-to-10000-ratings, atlas, y-2001-2010, guide-book, non-fiction, anthology, review-liked, author-female, fiction

Physically, this is a very lovely book. In concept it is surely a contender for the ultimate expression of armchair journalism on Earth?

The proportions and weight of this book makes it deeply satisfying to hold. I love the very feel of the paper; the minimal palette of colour; the (frustratingly unspecified) fonts used to set the texts. In relief, each island is positioned on a background of water-cool pale greyish-blue; annotated with bays and settlements, points and capes, lesser islands, san Physically, this is a very lovely book. In concept it is surely a contender for the ultimate expression of armchair journalism on Earth?

The proportions and weight of this book makes it deeply satisfying to hold. I love the very feel of the paper; the minimal palette of colour; the (frustratingly unspecified) fonts used to set the texts. In relief, each island is positioned on a background of water-cool pale greyish-blue; annotated with bays and settlements, points and capes, lesser islands, sand, ice, roadways, and more. Atolls convey a sense of hovering half-formed between dry land and wet reef.

Edward Tufte would, I believe, wholeheartedly approve of the design layout of information within this book. It’s beautiful, functional, and profoundly informative. With admirable elegance and economy, the thoughtful design behind this book ‘talks’ to its reader of data visual and numerical; the source and weight of which communicates understanding of the precise position inhabited on our planet by each of fifty chosen islands; some well known, most lesser known. All that was required of me was to use my eyes, native intelligence, and subconscious to select, recognise, assess and combine the subtle (and not so subtle) information-rich signals of communication.

Fifty islands ‘explored’ by the author and reader solely through the maps and writings of others. Ah! Therein lay my only problem with this book; and one that grew to be surprisingly irritatingly annoying (to me): the accompanying block text. This book has no bibliography. The (East German) author admits that she writes in tales; that over the course of centuries, facts have become fictionalised. She claims that her (un-evidenced) research is both extensive and factual; verily that from ancient and rare books she has ‘transformed’ and ‘appropriated’ texts . “… as sailors appropriate the lands they discover.”.

I skip-read every left hand page of such text. Soap bubbles popped and burst and wept their watery regrets. What I had expected would be a deeply satisfying elegant exposition on the page had been casually sabotaged through a lost opportunity. I craved facts, not factoids. Here was disappointment with a capital ‘D’. All I could temporarily retrieve was some satisfaction in the use of a yellow double “//” to indicate the end of a paragraph and the beginning of the next (on the same line). Some consolation! Meanwhile I wistfully speculated on the chances (if any) that the author and publisher just might be sufficiently kind and commercially minded enough to produce a second, different. version of this book, to market alongside this first one?

Meantime, licking my wounded hopes, I’ve retreated to the World Wide Web, and NASA’s wonderful webpages describing the exploration of Mars.
...more

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Sep 05, 2015 Isidora rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites

Fifty remote islands. The author didn't see them. I will probably never visit them. Every island has a story, beautiful like a fairy tale, and a beautiful map. This is a very good way to get through the winter. ...more

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Sep 24, 2019 Robert rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, travel

This is such a bizarre premise for a book - and yet likely to appeal to anybody who has ever been an Atlas Adventurer - someone who explored the world and their imagination using only an atlas. Well, I did that as a kid and even now, so the idea of vicariously exploring these oscure places appealed to me a lot. Vicariously at two removes, since the author hasn't been to any of them, either. (I have met people who've been to two of the places in this book, though.)

The design of the book is amazin ...more

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Mar 09, 2011 Courtney Johnston rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own, science, history, fiction

Envy is not a pretty emotion. It makes you feel empty, and small. Thankfully my delight in Judith Schalansky's 'Atlas of Remote Islands' was great enough to overwhelm the occasional twinge of envy that she, and not I, has made something that I find so utterly covetable. (Made worse, let's be honest, when I just discovered that she's a year younger than me).

Of course, I couldn't have created this book: it grows entirely out of Schalansky's own self. Her discovery of the household atlas as an eigh Envy is not a pretty emotion. It makes you feel empty, and small. Thankfully my delight in Judith Schalansky's 'Atlas of Remote Islands' was great enough to overwhelm the occasional twinge of envy that she, and not I, has made something that I find so utterly covetable. (Made worse, let's be honest, when I just discovered that she's a year younger than me).

Of course, I couldn't have created this book: it grows entirely out of Schalansky's own self. Her discovery of the household atlas as an eight-year-old in East Germany - her incredulity that places out there exist:

I grew up with an atlas. And as a child of the atlas, I had never travelled. The fact that a girl in my class had actually been born in Helsinki felt unimaginable. ... To this day, I am baffled by Germans born, for example, in Nairobi or Los Angeles. Of course I know that Nairobi and Los Angeles exist - they are on the maps. But that someone has actually been there or even been born there still feels incredible to me.

her recognition early in life that maps depict only one of many stories:

Then I looked for my country: the German Democratic Republic. East Germans could not travel, only the Olympic team were allowed beyond our borders. It took a frighteningly long time to find. It was pink and tiny as my fingernail. This was hard to equate: at the Seoul Olympics we had been a force to reckon with, with had won more medals than the United States: how could we suddenly be so infinitesimal?

the sudden expanding of her horizons:

My love for atlases endured when a year later everything else changed: when it suddenly became possible to travel the world, and the country I was born in disappeared from the map. But by then I had already grown used to travelling through the atlas by finger, whispering foreign names to myself as I conquered distant worlds in my parents' sitting room.

Aesthetically, Schalansky's book is one of the most gorgeous things I've handled. This is another part of the uniqueness of her vision - it is all her work: writer, typographer, illustrator. She limits her palette to black, grey, plover-egg blue and brilliant orange, and then she makes magic within her own restrictions. Each double-page spread features on the right a scale drawing of the selected island, carefully etched with place names in fine cursive script; on the left, a catalogue of information, including alternate names, size, number of inhabitants or residents, distance from other land and a brief timeline (I am in love with the slanting lines of these of the distance measurements and timelines).

But the real magic is in the short pieces of text - almost prose poems - that accompany each of the 50 islands. The book is sub-titled 'Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will', and the entries lie somewhere between research and hallucination, like the author feel asleep over her papers and dreamed of these faraway places, awoke, and tried to capture that feeling of distance, strangeness, heat, cold, the incessant beat of the waves.

The tales range from Amelia Earhart's disappearance to a band of women stoving in a men's head with a shovel; killer crabs to infanticide; burning penguins to treasure maps. I limited myself to no more than five or six islands a day when reading the book, so I wouldn't become used to Schalansky's style and start skim reading. Instead, I tried to absorb each entry slowly, and to stay in her world. Every entry is in the present tense, whether the story is from the 1800s, the 2000s or an unnamed time - this lends them both an immediacy and a timelessness. My heart thrilled to some mentions - Thule has been part of my imagination since a childhood soaked in Rosemary Sutcliff's Roman Britain, Tristan da Cunha since sighting William Hodgkins' majestic oil paintings, the Scandinavian names feels strangely like home, a combination of poring over Norse myths and Roald Dahl's childhood biography.

I had to resist turning between each entry and a quick trip into Wikipedia to fact check and fill in the gaps. I'm glad now that I did, that rather than trying to turn the book into non-fiction I let it stay in the litterol space it was conceived in. I am happy to have that time inside Schalansky's imagination, and to let mine roam free too. ...more

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May 18, 2019 Brendan Monroe rated it it was amazing

Shelves: essential, original, exploration, german, non-fiction, travel, geography, favorites, history, international

Everything about this book is beautiful. And I do mean everything. The illustrations, the font, the binding, and the text itself.

If these read dates are accurate, then I started reading this just over a year ago, on May 14th. I was about to embark on a trip to the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues and thought, "what could be better than reading a book about remote islands while on somewhat remote islands?"

Not much, really. But this is so much more than a beach read. It took me over a year to ...more

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Apr 19, 2019 GoldGato rated it it was amazing

Shelves: travel, spring, exploration

This is such a lovely book, I would have purchased it no matter what was inside. It turned out very well indeed as I learned so much about the various islands described, along with particular historical events. Of course, I also learned that maybe I never want to be shipwrecked on some of these islands.

Paradise is an island. So is hell.

Here are fifty lands where everything may not be quite as rosy as we think. Admittedly, some of us armchair dreamers may wish for a desert isle type of existence. ...more

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Jul 06, 2018 Graychin rated it really liked it

Even today, I could spend hours looking at maps – but when I was twelve years old and had the hours to spare, I did. Any kind of map would do: world atlases and road atlases, globes and National Geographic maps, topographical maps, boating maps, flight maps, geological survey maps, weather maps, vegetation maps and species range maps, the maps you might find printed on the endpapers of history books or of art books, or scattered among the entries of an encyclopedia.

I soon began drawing my own ma Even today, I could spend hours looking at maps – but when I was twelve years old and had the hours to spare, I did. Any kind of map would do: world atlases and road atlases, globes and National Geographic maps, topographical maps, boating maps, flight maps, geological survey maps, weather maps, vegetation maps and species range maps, the maps you might find printed on the endpapers of history books or of art books, or scattered among the entries of an encyclopedia.

I soon began drawing my own maps. I practiced the shapes of states, countries (contemporary or historical), and continents until I was able to do a fair job with many of them by memory. I drew maps of imaginary places too. In the cartographic style immortalized by dog-eared Tolkien paperbacks, I carved out coastlines with my pencil, plotted rivers, raised up hills and mountains, and marked out villages and citadels. In pursuit of greater scale and detail, I taped together sheet after sheet of painstakingly drawn maps until they covered my bedroom floor in a sort of visual epic narrative.

Knowing my love of maps, my children got me a copy of Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands for Father’s Day this year and I couldn’t have been more pleased. It’s a beautiful, fascinating book. Schalansky’s avowed aim is to raise the genre of the atlas to the status of literature, and she rather succeeds. Each of the fifty islands included is tastefully illustrated; it’s situation, total area, and population (if applicable) are described; and notable points in its history are plotted on a timeline.

The real pleasure of the book, however, lies in the brief essay-vignettes Schalansky writes for each island, capturing a moment or event of local historical note, often from an oblique or unexpected point of view. Some poetic license is taken, for sure, but it works. Every page is a surprise. However, as Schalansky notes in her delightful introduction, islands may be little hells as well as little heavens, and the grim and diabolical element plays strongly here.

Open the book, hold its covers flat on the table, and within the 180-degree compass of its pages you will visit every conceivable island terrain, from the merest coral atoll at the equator to a scabbed shelf of ancient seabed thrown up above the waves of the circumpolar sea. You will meet adventurers, prisoners, madmen, hermits, pirates, mutineers, scientists, nudists, utopians, explorers, murderers, and self-proclaimed kings.

I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything quite like this book. It reminds me somehow of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities or of Melville’s Mardi, but it is very much its own thing: like an island. ...more

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Dec 11, 2014 Trish rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: adventure, islands, nonfiction, ocean, something-completely-new, travel

Dip into this lovely small atlas anywhere and enjoy the fruits of Schalansky’s many years’ labor cataloging, mapping, labeling “Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will.” The drawings have a timeline and scale; they are labelled with longitude and latitude and are pinpointed on a globe. Each drawn island has contour with shading showing mountains, water, and plains. Each location sports a short introductory essay often including reports related by the earliest discoverers, or seafaring me Dip into this lovely small atlas anywhere and enjoy the fruits of Schalansky’s many years’ labor cataloging, mapping, labeling “Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will.” The drawings have a timeline and scale; they are labelled with longitude and latitude and are pinpointed on a globe. Each drawn island has contour with shading showing mountains, water, and plains. Each location sports a short introductory essay often including reports related by the earliest discoverers, or seafaring men who came upon these remote locations and told of what they found. The flyleaves show the islands pinpointed all together. A masterpiece of careful description, this wallet of dreams is something special for the sailor in all of us.

Consider this short essay about Pagan, a Pacific island 2,670 km from Manila and 840 km from Iwo Jima, discovered in 1669 by Diego Luis de Sanvitores:

The tallest mountain range in the world is underwater – where the Pacific plate converges with the Philippine plate in the Marianas Trench, several kilometres deep – and its smoking volcano cones rise out of the ocean.
Pagan is a double island of two of these volcanoes held together by a land mass, At its narrowest point, it is only a few hundred metres wide.

The village of Shomushon lies at the foot of Mount Pagan in the north. Its people want to be evacuated because smoke has been rising from the summit for some time, and there have been earthquakes. But no one takes any notice. They say the volcano is not dangerous.

On 15 May 1981, it erupts, spewing fire, hirling rocks and hooting fountains of lava into the air. The sky turns black; it rains ash and smells of sulphur and burning earth. The raised huts in Shomushon shake, and a flood of lava spread though the palm trees, Soon the first crackle of fire in the village is heard. The mayor sends a message by short-wave radio - This is it! Come get us! – before the sixty villagers flee, crossing the narrow neck of land to the south. They take refuge behind a mountain ridge and pray to be spared from the glowing river.

When they are evacuated by air shortly after, only the rooftops of Shomushon can be seen above the layer of brown ash. On Pagan, there are now 20 million tonnes of tuff stone, the material of the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla.

I am offering a giveaway of this title on my my blog until Dec 15, 2014. Visit and put your name in.
...more

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Nov 13, 2010 Meaghan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: travel, history, read-in-2010, trivia

This is beautifully written and well-nigh impossible to categorize. It's not a travel book. It's not a conventional atlas. There's a lot of history in here, but it's not a history book either. The book contains maps of fifty of the world's most isolated islands and one-page vignettes to accompany each one. Usually, but not always, these vignettes tell of some event in the island's history. The author is able to make each story absolutely fascinating and I am thirsty for more. Unfortunately she h ...more

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Apr 24, 2016 Marianthi rated it it was amazing

Fifty islands, fifty (dubious) stories; some mythological, others based on true facts, others not so much. All unique, all interesting, all extremely atmospheric and poignant. All stories that accompany beautiful cartography of places you will never visit indeed.

I can continue to list adjectives but all I have to say is that I enjoyed this book immensely.
You get to learn about specks of dust that are part of a universe so vast that it makes them, those teeny tiny places unimportant. Places that ...more

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Jan 17, 2016 DoctorM rated it it was amazing

Shelves: geography, far-foreign, essays

A lovely small book that offers up facts and tiny bits of history about lost places--- islands at the ends of the earth, islands that have fallen off the map. Schalansky herself was born in the old East Germany, in a DDR where travel was impossible and "escapism" had dangerous political overtones. Her little atlas is a kind of poem to the places overlooked on maps, a vision of invisible places that have stories worth recovering. An absolute delight to read. ...more

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Jan 14, 2018 Michael Scott rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction, travelit, design, art, dystopia

Atlas of Remote Islands is Judith Schalansky's purely East-European, formerly Communist-country travelogue. She was born in 1980, in East Germany, and by the time she discovered the joy of traveling--like many of us, as a child--she had to learn that traveling beyond the Iron Curtain was merely possible through one's imagination. Hence, the subtitle: fifty islands I have not visited and never will.

A dystopian travelogue! This mini-booklet covers fifty islands, spread systematically around the wo ...more

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Mar 27, 2012 Alex Flynn rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Marc McGee

An amazing work that is a testament to the possibilities of the book as both an object as well as a medium. It is as much visual art as it is narrative, containing fabulously composed pages, with hand drawn maps and typography developed by the author. I found the book randomly while writing in the library one day and was intrigued by the title, specifically the subheading “Fifty Islands I have never set foot on and never will”. Who would write such an atlas? Why would they be intrigued by these An amazing work that is a testament to the possibilities of the book as both an object as well as a medium. It is as much visual art as it is narrative, containing fabulously composed pages, with hand drawn maps and typography developed by the author. I found the book randomly while writing in the library one day and was intrigued by the title, specifically the subheading “Fifty Islands I have never set foot on and never will”. Who would write such an atlas? Why would they be intrigued by these remote patches of land lost in the sea? It was shelved in the travel section, next to other atlases, which made if all the more interesting. Was it really and atlas or some kind of ironic joke.

I thumbed through it quickly and brought it home to examine and read. The book starts with an introduction about the authors obsession with atlases as a child growing up in a divided It traces her love of maps and distrust of the political divisions and politics that goes into their creation. Map making is a very political affair.

The book reminded me a lot of invisible cities by Calvino. While it didn’t have the same poetic sensibility with the writing, it was still very good and deliciously elliptical. For remote places in the middle of the sea, each story told me just enough to get interested in finding more, but never to a satisfying degree. There was always something left unexplored, a character, a motivation, a piece of wilderness or wild bird. People end up at these places because something is missing in their lives and the stories reflecting this same lacunae of meaning. Tales of high seas adventures and daring escapes are excised from their youthful excitement and shown in more realistic light. These islands are lonely places and are sought by lonely men (and women, but usually men).

The stories straddle somewhere between fiction and non-fiction. This is not an accurate atlas or guide to islands of the world. It is a piece of art inspired but said islands. I’m quite comfortable with this, and I feel the book is very up front with this conceit. While they are presented as entries into an atlas, they are quite obviously not encyclopedic in nature. Each entry contains the co-ordinates location on the globe, distance from other sites, and timelines. These proximate to other lands and timelines are often very empty, and the long lines help convey the sense of isolation.

I think the best parts of the book are the hand drawn maps that accompany the stories. Each entry is on the left hand side of the book and each picture is on the right hand. Often the ratio of seas to island helps increase or decrease the sense of isolation one feels about the place. Some maps take up whole pages, with rivers and mountains and bays. Others are small dabs of white in a sea of blue. You feel, just by looking at them, lost and alone.

I highly recommend everyone at least take a look at this book. Having returned it from the library I think I now have to buy a copy.
...more

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Jul 03, 2011 K R N rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, masterpieces, islandbooks, maps

I love this book. Every part of it is exquisitely designed, and every part of it is a pleasure to look at. The cover is gorgeous, the margins and layout of the map pages are beautiful, so are the inside covers -- nothing is unintentional. Even the design of the 24 page text at the beginning -- it's large like in children's books, while she's talking about her childhood and faraway places, the feeling of how large the world is -- she toys visually with the idea of scale. If you see the book and t ...more

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Oct 25, 2012 Erik Fazekas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourite, read-in-cz, adult, historical

This was EXTRAORDINARY!!!
Is this Fiction of Non-Fiction?
Are these stories true or just the authors imagination? I dont´t know, but they are brilliant!

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Apr 24, 2020 Matt Ely rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, short-story-essay-letters

You should guess by the subtitle that this won't be light. In fact, the most upsetting thing about these stories is that they're true. With two pages of bare-bones, isolating introduction for each island, followed by a short story, the narrowness of the information provided matches the small scale of these strange, forgotten outcroppings. You should decide before you begin whether you want to have a phone nearby to aggressively Google each entry afterward. Sometimes that will be rewarding, and s ...more

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Dec 29, 2020 Rohan Crickmar rated it it was amazing

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Nov 15, 2019 Patricia rated it liked it

Shelves: botany-garden-nature, richandstrange

3.5
Charting these tiny, remote islands adds a vastness to world. Sometimes it was the perfect before-sleep book with wanna-be utopias and sublime ice-bound peaks. It could be nightmare-inducing though with quite a few disturbing stories of violence. The author is necessarily selective in the focus of these vignettes, leaving the reader to ponder over mysterious topography or wonder about those few inhabitants.

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Jun 14, 2013 Erica rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, art

The concept is fascinating: each island is drawn in exquisite detail in black, white, and orange (for cities and roads) and stranded on an expanse of pale blue. The layout evokes the isolation, the constant threat of the ocean. On the facing page is a small bit of factual information about the island: size, population, name, language, latitude & longitude, distances from three nearest land masses, and a timeline of its discovery. Below that is the text of the book, a single paragraph telling the The concept is fascinating: each island is drawn in exquisite detail in black, white, and orange (for cities and roads) and stranded on an expanse of pale blue. The layout evokes the isolation, the constant threat of the ocean. On the facing page is a small bit of factual information about the island: size, population, name, language, latitude & longitude, distances from three nearest land masses, and a timeline of its discovery. Below that is the text of the book, a single paragraph telling the story of a single aspect of the island. It is brief, clipped almost, and highly poetic prose that sometimes borders on cliché (“feathered tribe” for example) and I wonder about the translator striking that balance between accessibly poetic and trite. Though the language can get saccharine (an unusual problem in my experience of translations from German, so something I definitely wondered about) the facts are exquisitely chosen.

In some cases she focuses on the people, or a person: a horrifying historical event (hundreds of babies dying of tetanus), or something so surreal as to be unbelievable (Marc Liblin learning Rapa in his dreams as a six year old living in France). Sometimes its an environmental disaster, or surprising geographical feature. Very few are unremarkable – like most books intended for a mass market audience the pieces are dense with sensationalism disguised as fact. And some of these stories are easily verified by internet searching (the tetanus epidemic), and the sensationalism of the telling becomes quickly justified. But others, like the Marc Liblin story, is more or less unverifiable.

As a proponent of lying in creative non-fiction it doesn’t trouble me too much. The idea is the more important thing, and stories can have an emotional truth without having a journalistic truth. She asserts as much in the introduction:

“That’s why the question whether these stories are ‘true’ is misleading. All text in the book is based on extensive research and every detail stems from factual sources. I have not invented anything. However I was the discoverer of the sources, researching them through ancient and rare books and I have transformed the texts and appropriated them as sailors appropriate the lands they discover.” (20)

Of course the Marc Liblin story takes place in the 1960s, so sources would not have been in “ancient and rare books,” and yet the only hits from a google search are other reviews of this book. So what. The story has all the resonance of a Borges story, and for that reason I accept it as an imaginative truth if nothing else.

[Read the whole review: http://alluringlyshort.com/2013/06/15... ] ...more

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Dec 14, 2011 Barry rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction, read-in-2011

This book attracted me because of two traits of mine. Firstly Wanderlust; I have a thing for maps and reading or watching documentaries about places, but rarely seem to go anywhere! And secondly the fact that often I am just pretty much a loner. So I had to order it in to my library right away. I knew it was a ‘literary atlas’ from the get go, something the part of my brain that loves knowledge could love while enjoy good creative writing, sounds perfect! Unfortunately, it’s not.

I was left rathe This book attracted me because of two traits of mine. Firstly Wanderlust; I have a thing for maps and reading or watching documentaries about places, but rarely seem to go anywhere! And secondly the fact that often I am just pretty much a loner. So I had to order it in to my library right away. I knew it was a ‘literary atlas’ from the get go, something the part of my brain that loves knowledge could love while enjoy good creative writing, sounds perfect! Unfortunately, it’s not.

I was left rather disappointed on both accounts. But first I’d just like to say the presentation is exquisite, lovely art style on the Island maps and all beautifully bound in the style of an old school atlas, this is one of the very, very rare books now-a-days which I would actually prefer not to use my Kindle for. But once you start reading it starts going downhill.
On the atlas side; the hard facts, it’s simple a case of there not being enough information to really care about each Island. You get its Square km size, number of residents, km distances from its closest neighbours and a very meagre timeline of its major events, but that’s pretty much it. On to the writing and the problem is pretty much the same; the sparseness of it leaves it lacking any real depth. You get titbits of information, like I’m now aware of what Marlon Brando said about the Pitcairn Island, but in the timeline I’m also told that in 1856 residents resettled on Norfolk Island, then in 2002-5 there was a “rape trail”, where is the details on these? The quality of the writing it’s self is a bit hit-and-miss. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it flows correctly, but I am reading the English translation. But mostly it is very good, readable and creative, if there were ever more than 20 lines on a subject you could imagine a decent story coming out of it.

In conclusion it’s a nice coffee table book, but for any depth there is much better historical fiction on all the major goings on here covered in the literary portions, and for actual real world information you’ll be better of using a high quality general atlas, leaving this book of pretty remote use. ...more

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Feb 22, 2016 Robert Vaughan rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-i-read-in-2016

What drew me originally to this book is my utter fascination with maps, travel and islands. In fact, the day the book arrived, I'd already made a list of all of the islands I'd ever been to (not including lakes, or rivers!) and it was longer than I'd expected. I decided to look up one, off the northeastern coast of Australia called Hinchinbrook Island, which I visited in 1993. At the time I stayed at the Wilderness Lodge, the only one on the island, a modern day Swiss Family Robinson experience! ...more

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Feb 10, 2011 Katie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, translated, geography, female-author

Atlas of Remote Islands is a unique, beautiful little book. It starts out with an introduction in which the author describes her childhood love for atlases. She beautifully describes the wondrous process of discovering and imagining all the places around the world in which she will never set foot. The introduction is followed by maps and a short vignettes about fifty different remote islands. The author states in her introduction that everything is based upon extensive research of rare texts and ...more

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About Judith Schalansky

Judith Schalansky

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Judith Schalansky studied Art History at the FU Berlin and Communication Design at the Fachhochschule Potsdam. After finishing her studies in 2007 she taught Typographic Basics at the Fachhochschule Potsdam until 2009.
Her first publication was the typographic compendium Fraktur mon Amour. From then she switched more to writing books for which she also did the graphical design. In 2008 she debuted ...more

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“Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits--the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.” — 16 likes

“Le carte geografiche sono astratte e allo stesso tempo concrete, e nonostante pretendano di essere oggettive, non offrono una riproduzione della realtà, bensì una sua ardita interpretazione.” — 1 likes

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