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Encyclopedia of Exploration Volume IV | ||
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René Pélissier, Africana Studia, 12, 2009 | |
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The work that incontestably forces respect and will render service to a very large public, in fact to all those interested in the discovery of the earth, that is to say, most often, to the origins of all colonization, is that of Raymond John Howgego who brings us the fourth section of an editorial enterprise that we did not hesitate to qualify as Promethean when we had the first three volumes in our hands. | ||
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Felipe Fernández-Armesto, TLS February 2009 | |
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Howgego insists his work is complete. He even threatens, like Catullus, to take to his bed. If true, it is a pity. I can think of no other work of reference, on such a vast scale, compiled so efficiently, and so comprehensively, by a single individual, since Johnson’s Dictionary. Howgego’s writing has got better with each volume. | ||
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RICHARD H. DILLON, Book Club of California Newsletter Winter 2008 | |
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Raymond John Howgego's Encyclopedia of Exploration is a four-part set of books from Derek McDonnell's Hordern House in New South Wales. It is an extra-ordinary example of modern publishing and a tour de force of one-man geography, history and bibliography. | ||
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Choice Magazine Vol 46 No.1 - Sep 2008 | |
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This final volume covers continental exploration for the period 1850 to 1940 and has the same organization, layout, and impressive appearance as the previous ones. It features 911 major articles on explorers and 12 on regions, e.g., "Alaska: Inland Exploration, 1860-1900." | ||
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Life & Leisure, Armchair traveller - Sep 2008 | |
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Raymond Howgego's prodigious Encyclopedia of Exploration looks more like a topographic feature than a set of books. Its four gigantic tomes chronicle the history of world travel and exploration, from ancient accounts inscribed on Babylonian clay tablets to the 1982 mapping survey by a group of intrepid English schoolboys and their teachers of Inaccessible Island, a precipitous speck in the far South Atlantic Ocean. | ||
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Milton E. Osborne: | |
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Well before the end of the nineteenth century it ‘had become a relatively simple matter for an explorer to disembark at his destination, assemble an expedition, and then to disappear for an indefinite period into the mountains, deserts or jungles of his or her choice'. This said, it was during the period covered by Howgego's final volume that some of the best-known and most heroic examples of expeditionary travel took place. | ||
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Ian Morrison: Australian Book Review | |
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Howgego's writing is concise and factual, but never dry. Over the course of the four massive volumes, he takes a consistently sceptical approach to unconfirmed discoveries: if an expedition is not documented, if no information was disseminated as a result of it, it can be argued that it made no contribution to human knowledge. | ||
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Beau Riffenburgh: Scott Polar Research Institute | |
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This is the fourth and final volume of what truly is a magnum opus. And it would be remarkable if anyone with serious interests in the history of exploration were not familiar with the previous volumes of this work (Howgego 2003, 2004, 2006), which, uniquely in my view, serve equally well as an introduction for the general reader and a meticulous recounting of the specifics and minutiae for the specialist. | ||