My name is Eden E. and I am a freshman at Lake Travis High School. I have lived in Lakeway for five years now but I was born and raised in Bartlett, TN and lived there until i was 10 years old. In 2010 my family and I moved to Lakeway. Every year my mom and I try to take a girls trip. Our adventures have taken us everywhere from Las Vegas, NV to Jamaica, from New York City to Cancun, Mexico, from jumping off the top of a 108 story skyscraper to scuba diving in the Atlantic. I have never been to a different continent, but I hope to someday have the chance to visit England. I am not fluent in any foreign language languages, but I am working on my spanish skills.
In chapter 1, Eccentricity, Ken Jennings opens the book with the telling of his findings as he reminisced in a box of his childhood treasures. He explains, “ The box was like an archaeological dig of my adolescence and childhood, starting with R.E.M mixed tapes and Spy magazines on top, moving downward through a strata of Star Trek novelizations and Thor comics, and ending on my most primal bedrock of my youthful nerdiness: a copy of Hammond’s Medallion World Atlas from 1979.” (1) Jennings proceeds in explaining his love for that particular atlas wasn’t the end to his obsession with the complexity of maps and “the way they could suggest adventure by hinting at the unexplored.” (3)
As the chapter progresses, he turns to the topic of how maps have been made for so long that we have no record of when the first map was conceived. “Our oldest example is a bronze plate from China’s Zhou Dynasty. Centuries more pass until we get our oldest surviving paper map, a Greek papyrus depicting the Iberian Peninsula around the time of christ.” (8) Jennings explains that all mapheads have this kind of “first map” discovery for themselves; it is the one that draws them in and makes them realize the wonder that maps hold. Most of these people conceal their love. They live in the shadows, but every once and a while you can find a few that may be hiding in your life. He ends the chapter by revealing that in Mapheads he will be exploring “the mystery of what makes our consuming map obsession tick.” (12)
I was surprised when I found out that people really enjoyed looking at maps, but I was also somewhat envious. Maps aren’t something that people talk about all the time and more than likely you don’t keep an atlas of the world in your backpocket, but it really is a talent to have the ability to name all the countries in the world or all of the rivers in Europe. It’s truly a gift to be born with that kind of intelligence. The people who have this ability may not always have the opportunity to show off their secret skill, but I hope every maphead will get the chance one day so flaunt their knowledge of the world we live in.
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