ATLAS OF WORLD HISTORY (Rand McNally: $14.95...

ATLAS OF WORLD HISTORY (Rand McNally: $14.95 paperback).

AMERICAN WORLD ATLAS (Prentice-Hall: $39.95).

“Show me the map of a region and I will tell you its history,” Rand McNally’s introduction quotes a French geographer as promising. And as it charts civilizations, explorations, invasions, migrations and more, this work does tell and show you, in an engaging and enlightening manner, how geography dictates history. Still, a tendency toward clutter and garishness prevent you from feeling that history, as you do in the more sensuous, albeit more expensive, Times of London historical atlas. Moving to the present, Prentice-Hall naturalizes its British-born University Atlas by devoting extra detail to the Americas rather than Europe and by adding a state-by-state U.S. section. The result scores high in beauty, with physical maps that virtually rise from the page to greet you. Its utility, though, is lessened by crowding too much onto each 9x12-inch page, the absence of city maps and an index that provides only longitude and latitude (34.9N, 118.9W) and not grid coordinates (H3). In this price range, the $45 National Geographic is a more useful atlas.