A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels

Henderson’s brilliant exploration borrows from the form of one of the oldest & most widely known sources of wonder: maps. Large, detailed mappae mundi invited people in medieval Europe to vividly imagine places & possibilities they had never seen before: manticores with the head of a man, the body of a lion, & the stinging tail of a scorpion; tribes of one-eyed men who fought griffins for diamonds; & fearsome Scythian warriors who drank the blood of their enemies from their skulls. 

As outlandish as these maps & the stories that went with them sound to us today, Henderson argues that our views of the world today are sometimes no less incomplete or misleading. Scientists are only beginning to map the human brain, for example, revealing it as vastly more complex than any computer we can conceive. Our current understanding of physical reality is woefully incomplete. 

A New Map of Wonders explores these & other realms of the wonderful, in different times & cultures and in the present day, taking readers from Aboriginal Australian landscapes to sacred sites in Great Britain, all the while keeping sight questions such as the cognitive basis of wonder & the relationship between wonder & science.

Beautifully illustrated & written with wit & moral complexity, this sequel to The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a fascinating account of the power of wonder & an unforgettable meditation on its importance to our future.