"Earthbound humans are unable to embrace more than a tiny part of the planetary surface. But in their imagination they can grasp the whole of the earth, as a surface or a solid body, to locate it within infinities of space and to communicate and share images of it."-from the Preface Long before we had the ability to photograph the earth from space-to see our planet as it would be seen by the Greek god Apollo-images of the earth as a globe had captured popular imagination. In Apollo's Eye, geographer Denis Cosgrove examines the historical implications for the West of conceiving and representing the earth as a globe: a unified, spherical body. Cosgrove traces how ideas of globalism and globalization have shifted historically in relation to changing images of the earth, from antiquity to the Space Age. He connects the evolving image of a unified globe to politically powerful conceptions of human unity.

Prizes

Winner of PROSE Award for Best Book in Geography and Earth Sciences 2004 (United States)

Well written, copiously illustrated, and with an excellent section of notes at the end of each chapter, the author and publishers of this book are to be commended. -- David Cooper Geography The richly embroidered garment he has woven together provides a really stimulating argument for anyone interested in the links between representation and political process... Apollo's Eye is constantly thought-provoking. -- Chris Perkins Society of Cartographers Bulletin Apollo's Eye will appeal to a broad range of readers, in part because its subject is so keenly relevant to current world events. Cosgrove's erudition is as impressive as ever... Cosgrove shows convincingly how successive understandings of the globe were inflected and distinguished by new technologies and techniques of analysis and representation. -- David L. Hays Cultural Geographies 2004 A fascinating and unique history. -- Sylvia Bender Western Association of Map Libraries 2006

Denis Cosgrove is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His previous books include The Iconography of Landscape, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and Its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-Century Italy, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, and Mappings.