Edward B. Espenshade, Jr. (1910–2008)

Being a general-purpose atlas, probably intended more for library reference than for home use. A great deal of space is given over to thematic maps which will be of limited interest to home users. The regional maps are adequate, but they are not as detailed as they could have been if less space had been devoted to the thematic maps. Much more attention could and should have been devoted to the city and metropolitan area maps, as is the case with almost all atlases.

Rivers, mountains, and continents? Oh, my...

Decent atlas. I had to use this in my beginning world geography course. Cant think of anything really wrong with this text, but there wasn’t anything really right.

I cut my teeth on this atlas, and sought out this edition sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. East Germany, Yugoslavia, and the USSR have gone the way of the Belgian Congo, Persia and Siam. I knew the Soviet Union was in trouble, BTW, when Time published a color-coded map of the Soviet republics, something I'd never seen before in a Western publication.