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In Praise of Lunatics
Imagine a world bereft of the daft, a place where everybody followed the posted limit and wore sensible loafers.

Missing would be the guy who, among other behaviors, once stuck a needle in his eye and poked around inside of it just to see what happened. His name was Sir Isaac Newton. Or Shroedinger, one of those physicists whose reputations as scientists are analogous to that of rock band drummers. Shroedinger proved, theoretically, that a cat could be dead and alive at the same time. It was purely a mental exercise -- no animals were harmed in this picture -- but the drummers of quantum physics cheered.

Early mapmaking relied on stories from travelers, guesswork and imagination. Fra Mauro, the Venetian priest who designed a mappamundi, listened to the tales of traders and other peregrinators such as Marco Polo, even though some scholars now label Polo a blowhard who never even crossed the Bosporous. Others like Columbus told of one-eyed men with dog snouts. What had Sir Walter Raleigh beensmoking when he returned from South America with stories of headless men with eyes on their chests?

That goes a long way in proving my theory that most of the great explorers were self-promoting liars.

Miles Harvey offers us a primer on the history, obsessions and crimes of map collecting as he tracks a modern map thief in "The Island of Lost Maps."

Antique maps have recently become extremely valuable. A couple of years ago I made a tour of map stores in London and found hundreds of them that had been ripped from old books. I was bothered by this but until I read Harvey's book, I didn't realize how serious the problem was. Harvey tells the story of arch-map thief Gilbert Bland, a man as faceless as his name, who plundered libraries by slicing antique maps out of books. Bland was sniffed out by a band of internet-linked librarians and the FBI, but only after stealing hundreds of rare maps from reading rooms across the US and Canada.

There is not much of a story in Bland, himself, --yup, he done it, but a twisted criminal genius he ain't -- and the author's self-discovery is a bit of a thumb sucker, but "The Island of Lost Maps" remains a good read and a good introduction to the lore of those ancient worlds of cherubs and sea monsters.

I also had a ham radio license when I was a kid. Hearing Morse code chirp through the static from some exotic land and being able to chirp back was thrilling for a landlocked flatlander. My code key, a Vibroplex, sits on my desk near my DSL-connected computer. The telegraph chirps have now been replaced by e-mail Viagra and home mortgage ads from some of the same places I once thought exotic.

The Web is often visualized as a map if not a parallel universe. Note that Rough Guides, the travel guide company, has also gotten into the Web guide business. "The Rough Guide to The Internet" is a pocket sized (cargo pants) compilation of everything you need to know…nothing less, nothing more…written for those for whom technology isn't discussed in polite company. It is not a "Dummies" book, it is a smarties book for people with balance in their lives.

It takes the reader through the basics of setup, connections, security -- the grunt stuff -- but ends up in a concise, sometimes eclectic, but useful guide to web sites and search tools. I ended up adding several suggested sites to my collection of bookmarks. It also, like all Rough Guides, has a slightly off-center point of view, refreshing in these days of creeping corporate blandness on the Web.

For a map of travel (earth, sea and land) on the Web, Michael Shapiro is the acknowledged expert. His "Internet Travel Planner" takes Rough Guides' puny travel section several steps further with top-flight advice and insightful reviews of web sites and services. It actually takes you through the steps of planning a trip, which can not only be an adventure in the travail sense, but a learning and networking experience as well.

If you think DSL delivers packages rather than packets get both books. If you are a net "smartie" Shapiro's will do just fine alone.

Oral History
"Wine and War"

I have sampled just enough of France's Grand Cru wines to lose control of saliva whenever I even hear the name of one: a delicate Mouton that graced a Thanksgiving dinner, a Yquem that once rolled across my palate like honey from some higher order of bee.

I haven't tasted a French First Growth in several years…too expensive. During the height of the dot com mania, our neighborhood Long's drugstore sold Chateau Lafite-Rothschild at the checkout counter next to the chewing gum and the National Enquirer: a $140 impulse item.

"Wine and War," by Don and Petie Kladstrup, is the only history book I have ever read that had both a taste and a "nose." Every time this story of WWII France from the point of view of five winemaking families cited some unconscionable act of the Gestapo, I knew I could seek refuge in the bouquet of a previous chapter.

I share a bit of a past with authors Don and Petie Kladstrup. In the early seventies Don and I labored in the trenches of local television, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In those climes, antifreeze-style drinks were de rigeur. I quaffed training wines: Gallo Hearty Burgundy, wicker-girdled flagons of cheap Chianti and, on really special occasions, a poofy Beaujolais. World War II history was DULL stuff to me then. Better to save any gift for detail for something important…like batting averages. Good oral histories from broadcasters such as the BBC's Charles Allen's "Tales of the South China Sea" and the Kladstrup's "Wine and War" would have changed my attitude.

Don Kladstrup spent most of his career in Europe as a news correspondent for CBS and ABC. "Wine and War" does what good documentary television can accomplish: lets people, events and environments speak for themselves with little stylistic intervention from the reporter. The Kladstrups plainly tell stories of human strengths and frailties, of the Weinführers who brokered for the Nazis, of vintners hiding Jewish refugees and smuggling members of the Underground in wine barrels, of the sheer joy of a glass of simple plonk in a prison camp. This unaffected, non-judgmental storytelling forced me stop and consider -- for myself -- the moral dilemmas and the difficult decisions that millions had to make during those years. "Wine and War" has body, mature tannins and a wonderful nose.

Adolph Hitler, by the way, did not like wine. Figures.

Buy "Wine and War" at Amazon.com