Any book with the words ‘atlas’ or ‘map’ in the title holds a strong attraction for me. I’ve always been a visual person and reading the wonderful variations on the theme of geographic place almost always results in a fascinating and illuminating experience.

There’s the “Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I have Never Set Foot on and Never Will”, “Mapping it Out: An Alternative Atlas of Cartographies”, “Atlas of Forgotten Places: Journey to Abandoned Destinations From Around the Globe”, “Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities”, and the “World’s Edge: the Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity”.  Each of these books that I’ve read in the past has provided hours of interesting reading, wonderful maps, and fascinating facts.  Defoe’s book is no exception.

Acknowledging from the beginning that the definition of ‘country’ or ‘nation state’ is fluid and flexible, he introduces the reader to 48 ‘extinct countries’, places that had existed as independent entities at some time in the past.  Some, like Ruthenia, also known as Carpatho-Ukraine, lasted for just a day while others, like Yugoslavia trundled along for decades before succumbing to civil war, foreign intervention, or circumstances beyond their control.

Many of these places were the creations of charlatans, grifters, and other ne’er do wells.  The “Great Republic of Rough and Ready” was carved out of the Sierra foothills when California was about to become a state.  It was created by miners attempting to avoid taxes, and they had elected a president and adopted a constitution before they realized that they would be unable to celebrate the 4th of July and by getting drunk if they were a separate nation.  End of Rough and Ready.  There have been kingdoms, republics, free states, principalities, and even the Islands of Refreshment, 1500 miles from the nearest continent and turned into a “glorified service station” for passing ships by a Salem, MA adventurer named Jonathan Lambert. The Islands were established in 1811 and lasted less than a year before the British swallowed them up. They even have a UK postal code today!

In addition to learning about these weird places, I gleaned a real pearl of new information.  Defoe provided a map and the specific location of each nation and its capital, but instead of using longitude and latitude which he rejected as bulky and uninterpretable in many cases, he used an app called What3Words.  Developed in 2013, What3Words has divided the globe into 57 trillion boxes measuring about 10 feet on each side and then used a random system to assign three words to each box.  There are 40,000 English words in use along with about 25,000 words in each of 50 other languages.  For example, my Cambridge address is stones.plus.cook and you can find me in Vermont at promoting.finance.farmed.  Beats me why this is useful or important, but there it is.

Defoe writes with wit and humor as he recounts the often ridiculous tales of how these countries came to be and how they disappeared.  Embedded in these stories of obscure places are brief histories of real entities like Formosa (Taiwan) and Yugoslavia that continue to have an impact in today’s world.

If you’re looking for light reading and a well-told story of human folly, Defoe’s book will provide hours of entertainment.