Where on earth are we going?

In times like these, it can be hard to know which way is up. But it's always been a subject of debate: For the 16th-century cartographer Juan de la Cosa, the top of the map was west, in the direction of his first voyage with Christopher Columbus. Nearly 500 years later, Stuart McArthur of Melbourne, Australia, produced a map with a southward orientation; when his teacher reprimanded him, he held his ground, finally publishing his upside-down map in 1979. "East is East, and West is West," as Kipling had it—but where does the one start and the other end?

- IAN VOLNER

It's a topsy-turvy world. We're just rotating on it.

This, at any rate, is the conclusion of Four Points of the Compass, a cultural history from the author and University of London academic Jerry Brotton that explores the whats and whys of those little arrows that guide our feet and, occasionally, our fate.

The book is not for those with severe inner-ear imbalances: Chapter by chapter, Brotton hopscotches from east to south to north to west, systematically destabilizing our inherited conventions of spatial organization along the way.

"There is no reason why north should necessarily sit at the top of modern world maps," he writes, then proceeds to enlist a rather dizzying array of sources—not just Kipling and McArthur and de la Cosa, but Henry David Thoreau, José Martí, the Manus islanders of Papua New Guinea, NASA, and Frodo Baggins—to show us how we got here, and where we might be headed.