Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes acclaimed author and all-time Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings to the store to discuss and sign Maphead on Thursday, April 19th at 7pm.
Now out in paperback, Maphead takes readers on a world tour of geogeeks, from the London Map Fair to the bowels of the Library of Congress, from the prepubescent geniuses at the National Geographic Bee to the computer programmers at Google Earth. Each chapter delves into a different aspect of map culture: highpointing, geocaching, road atlas rallying, even the "unreal estate" charted on the maps of fiction and fantasy. Jennings also considers the ways in which cartography has shaped our history, suggesting that the impulse to make and read maps is as relevant today as it has ever been.
Ken Jennings won seventy-four games and $2.52 million on Jeopardy!, both U.S. game show records. His book, Brainiac, about his bizarre Jeopardy! adventures and the phenomenon of trivia in American culture, was a national bestseller. He currently lives outside Seattle, with his family and a deeply unstable Labrador retriever named Banjo.