The late philosopher Roland Barthes had a fear of heights and a hatred of mountains. Had he been around to read McPherson\u2019s book, he might have reconsidered: Seeing from up high can yield awe, and while \u201cawe often carries an undercurrent of fear,\u201d it can provoke some, if you will, elevated thoughts. It can also yield awareness of what surveyors call \u201cground truth,\u201d a point that McPherson, author of Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, addresses with his account of John B. Bachelder. An artist who arrived at the Gettysburg battlefield two days after the fighting there had stopped, Bachelder drew an aerial-perspective map that was so detailed that, after publication in 1864, thousands of military officers on both sides scrutinized it; in the end, after collating their findings, \u201conly a single regiment was moved.\u201d From there McPherson moves on to explore the 19th-century \u201cmania\u201d for bird\u2019s-eye-view maps made by artists who \u201chad learned well the perspective drawing of Renaissance masters.\u201d McPherson darts from subject to subject, from the workings of aerial intelligence in modern spycraft to the AI targeting systems being used to bombard Gaza and the proliferation of drones. The narrative is thus rather diffuse\u2014he himself admits to \u201cattempting to keep many topics in view\u201d\u2014and the writing can sometimes drift into the purply abstract (\u201cWhat is the length of a feeling? Totality lasted minutes, or an eternity, or was nothing at all.\u201d) And while there are better books and articles on perception from above, including Barry Lopez\u2019s peerless essay \u201cFlight\u201d and William Langewiesche\u2019s Inside the Sky, McPherson\u2019s book has some fine moments, perhaps most memorably his slog up a Texas mountain to look at a clock that\u2019s meant to tick away for the next 10,000 years, taking a long view indeed.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The late philosopher Roland Barthes had a fear of heights and a hatred of mountains. Had he been around to read McPherson\u2019s book, he might have reconsidered: Seeing from up high can yield awe, and while \u201cawe often carries an undercurrent of fear,\u201d it can provoke some, if you will, elevated thoughts. It can also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4536"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}