Jean-Michel Lebigre · 2003
The reviewer describes GERTIL's 2002 Atlas de Timor Leste as a Portuguese-language team publication with nine chapters and about 45 topics, generally mapped at 1:1,200,000, plus six topographic sheets at 1:250,000 covering the country. Its coverage includes history and culture, the natural environment, administration, population and settlement, economic activity, international trade, and development indicators. The reviewer finds the information surprisingly rich for a country emerging from prolonged violence, while noting uneven precision that reflects heterogeneous available data. Criticisms include pictograms without size variation, unnumbered maps, and errors in precipitation and bathymetric units. Developed commentaries, graphs, abundant high-quality colour photographs, and monochrome drawings of Timorese traditions receive praise. The reviewer considers the atlas complementary to Frédéric Durand's geohistorical atlas.
René Pélissier · 2004
The reviewer praises Atlas de Timor Leste as a reliable, visually attractive and ideologically uncommitted reference covering the essentials of physical, human, economic and political geography, with information current to 2000–2001. Intended for Timorese readers, its accessibility to young people educated in Indonesian remains conditional on their ability to read it. The volume includes a detailed 1:250,000 map spread across several pages and places Timor-Leste in its global and regional context. The reviewer commends the carefully reproduced colour maps and photographs, while noting that nineteenth- and twentieth-century history is largely absent from the maps, though discussed in the text, and recommends it as an indispensable library reference.
