Customer Reviews

Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I guess it's to be expected from a book called "Geography in America" that perspectives outside the American mainstream are missing. The book is fabulously comprehensive in a way that would benefit anyone whose interest in geography goes beyond the University core requirements.

The editors sent out requests to prominent members of each Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers asking for an overview of work done in that specialty between approximately 1990 and 2000. Each specialty group was allowed a relative amount of space in the book based on the relative size of their group to the size of the AAG. Gary Gaile, one of the eds, likes such simple quantifications. Chapters were presented to other prominent members of the specialty groups and some were eliminated (like Biblical Geography) because they just were up to par.

The book itself is filled with many gems. Each chapter is reasonably well-written and provides the eager researcher with a good idea of what occured during the last decade of the millenium. Of course, each chapter is well-cited and provides a great bibliography of the highpoints of the decade should the reader want more.

I've got the first edition of this book and it was very good. After looking at the table of contents, I'd like this edition, but not at $150. I'll try at the library and revise my review later, but this is NOT the way to bring potential students into the fold. Two stars for not thinking about marketability, right when the field of Geography needs a boost from the best researchers. Was this book meant to sit on the reference shelf and gather dust?
Revised comments:
The paperback edition is out and worth every penny, so I'd give this book a 5 star rating. If you're currently studying or have studied geography, you'll probably zero in on the chapters that are of interest. And you may find some thin coverage. For example the Geomorphology chapter failed to give a thorough account of American Geoarchaeology other then to mostly praise K. Butzer. The Medical Geography chapter completely missed the boat on the critical connection between Environmental Health Science and Phy./Cultural Geography as practiced in the states. The few paragraphs covering Land use Planning and Env. Issues in the chapter on Applied Geography did not positively inspire or mention the numerous resources available for the huge number of geographers involved in or considering a career in land planning (see my Amazon review of Marsh's book Landscape Planning).
However, taken in its totality the book is an inspiration for the American student of this subject. I look forward to other Amazon reviews.