Customer Reviews

Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism

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H.J. de Blij is one of those rare academics and writers who has never lost focus on real issues and challenges affecting our world. As a veteran and highly skilled geographer he is diligently observant, seeks connections and relationships between issues, and places them into an essential geographic context. This is a book about three major challenges facing the US (and the world)- Climate Change, the Rise of China and Islam . It's a book that (thankfully) challenges the sterile prevailing world view and propaganda peddled by many politicians in the US and elsewhere. It is insightful, honest, extremely thought-provoking and says what needs to be said in carefully analyzed and logical sections. Finally, it is beautifully written and easy to read in a style that is engaging, interesting and rich with facts. Highly recommended. Buy it and I guarantee, you will never quite look at these specific challenges or the world in the same way again. It paints a future that is difficult and uncertain and dark in some respects. But far from hopeless. The question is whether the decision and policy makers will rise to these challenges in an enlightened and serious manner? H. J de Blij lays out the challenges in no uncertain terms - how they will be addressed by the international community and the US in particular, remains to be seen. The stakes are very high indeed.

This quite brilliant study uses maps to explain the challenges to America and the world. He analyzes the truth about global warming and delves into the topics such as the decline of Europe and Russia, the mess of Africa and the Islamist and Chinese threat to the world. He looks at the conflict potential of powerful china vis-à-vis America. Then he looks at the `front line' of Islam, in Africa and elsewhere. We see here the true front of terror, the countries where Islam is a border state suffer the most terrorism, i.e Sudan, Nigeria, Phillipines, Israel, Yugoslavia, Russia, China. This is a concise geographers view of the world, for those who feel most books don't include enough maps this is a wonderful change, the maps here are excellent and help prove the point and enlighten the reader.

Highly recommended, this book completes the set of new books to detail the new world order(Clash of Civilizations and Pentagons New Map). A wonderfully written, daring and original work.

Seth J. Frantzman

Although I did find, as one of the editorial reviews said, this book to be slightly unfocused, I believe that its virtues much outweigh this slight imperfection. De Blij provided me with relevant information that I was unaware of, such as:

1) The Shia population in Iraq generally follows a more apolitical, less publicly assertive form than the Shia in Iran. This may have some relevance to current events in Iraq.

2) Rightly or wrongly, the Chinese government has strong disagreements with a number of neighboring countries about where their mutual borders should be located.

3) The population decline in Russia is especially severe in the far eastern parts of Siberia, which isn't dense populated to begin with. Thus the migration of Korean and Chinese into these parts of Siberia could have more political implications than would be the case if there was a large Russian population in this area.

De Blij does give several examples where spatial proximity is relevant to current events, thus supporting his contention that spatial arrangements are important for predicting future events (for example recent conflicts in Africa have arisen in several countries in which the dividing line between majority non-Musim and majority Muslim populations occur). I agree with one of the editorial reviews that this is a bit vague, but I think it is nonetheless a worthwhile point to keep in mind.

He may be a bit hard on Islam, in that I can think of more than one religion that has texts that express ideas I find alarming.

Suppose the University of Michigan loses a football game to Nebraska by a score of 32 to 28. What do you think the reaction will be of Wolverine fans in those little villages one can spot on a map, Goblu and Beatosu? As this book explains, there won't be any. Some impish cartographer simply made these hamlets up! And there's a moral to this story. Maps can be used to deceive people, or simply tell outright lies. Yes, geography can be important!

However, the main thrust of this book is to cover a huge amount of ground in trying to put three main issues into geographic perspective. The issues are, of course, climate change, the rise of China as a global force, and the threat of Islamic terrorism. That means understanding the geography of the present, so that one can assess what may be happening.

This book does cover plenty of ground, and I'm sure there will be quite a few people (including myself) who feel the author has not only made a bunch of minor errors here and there but has also taken a number of interesting and controversial stands without being completely convincing. For example, just how solid is the evidence for a link between the Uralic languages and Japanese? And how sure are we that around 10,000 years ago, an enormous ice sheet slid into the Atlantic, sending a wall of water into the Mediterranean and then into the Black Sea which caused the water to rise at a rate of 6 inches per day, until the water level was 500 feet higher?

Still, I think de Blij has some useful and valuable material about the three main questions. He does a good job of telling about the ice ages of the past 400,000 years. Basically, there have been four ice ages, with an average length of about 80,000 years, with warm periods between them lasting about 20,000 years. That is the big picture. And it means that we probably ought to think about what sorts of climate changes the several billion people on this planet may need to get ready for.

The next interesting topic is demographics. Just what population changes seem to be occurring right now? Only a generation ago, many folks assumed that the world's population would grow catastrophically until some disaster stopped it. Now it appears that this may not be the case: in many areas, populations are declining right now. Italy and Germany are good examples of this phenomenon, and de Blij predicts that the total population of the anticipated 27 nations of the European Union will drop during the next 50 years and more, staying under 500 million. That means that the political and military influence Europe, which used to dominate the world, may continue to decrease. And the author shows us plenty of maps of portions of Europe which put some of its issues into much better perspective.

We also see maps of Russia (another nation with a declining population) and China, and some interesting speculations about their futures. And there is a map showing the "front" between the Islamic and non-Islamic portions of Africa that the author uses to discuss various threats of religious strife there.

Obviously, our civilization faces many potential threats, and the future is quite uncertain. But I agree that we ought to consider threats that we're already able to see, and I think it is proper to start by looking intelligently at the present situation and at fundamental trends. I think the author makes a good effort to do just this.

This book covers so much information it is difficult to define. One way is as a world history with an emphasis on geography and a lecture on world politics (albeit I agree with most of his lecture). He talks primarily about climate change, population, China, Russia, Europe, Africa and terrorism.

It could have been great but there are just too many shortcomings.

1. Obviously the editor did not spend too much time on this book (i.e., misspellings and incorrect word choice and basic facts that are glaringly wrong). The issue here is missing the simple mistakes makes me wonder about his other facts. One simple mistake is 127 billion people in Japan (pg 97). This leads to the next point.

2. No footnotes, this is huge to me. Most of his facts were not backed up with a source.

3. Misquotes and incorrect definitions of words and terms.
For example, "Spy, but verify" instead of "Trust, but Verify"
Also, "spy plane" in regards to the EP-3 is factually incorrect. The EP-3 is a reconnaissance plane that was on an overt (not covert) mission over international waters.

Overall, I still enjoyed the book and recommend reading it (please skip the first chapter or at least speed read through it). I would not reference the book's facts without checking them somewhere else first.

It was a delightful book on geography,very penetratting and insightful for anybody who are concerned about our present problems challenging the US. But there are a few inaccuracies, unusual for a life time member of the National Geographic Society.First the Guangzi Zhuang AR in China is the Chinese of the West ( not East,Guangdong is East).Second ,the town of Beslan is in North Ossetia ( not South Ossetia which is part of Georgia).Third, Gibraltar is situated off the eastern entrance ( not western)of the Strait.
These are the few discrepancies that I have picked up and hope that they will be corrected on the next editions.Otherwise it is an excellent book that I strongly recommended to everybody.
David Vu,MD.
dvvu90@hotmail.com

Why Geography Matters is a well-researched and written book by an expert in the field, but the subtitle is a bit misleading. Sure, the book covers the three threats the author claims are confronting the United States, namely climate change, a growing China and global terrorism, but it also covers geology and the history of the world from the beginning of time. The author also spends considerable amounts of time with chapters on the European Union, Russia as well as Africa. While there are some insights and useful information contained in the book, the arguments tend to be articulated better in other sources. I wholeheartedly agree that geography is a critical discipline that does not often get the respect it deserves, but this book is not the final authority when it comes to geo-politics and the current state of the world.

that provides not just food but rather a feast for thought. This book will vastly improve one's understanding of the world today.

I would describe this book as the rambling--but occasionally insightful--musings of a thoughtful scholar. Unfortunately, many, if not most, of Blij's arguments are not made from a geographic perspective. For instance, his chapter on the European Union rambles on for page after page about the history of the EU from the European Coal and Steel Community, to the European Economic Community, to the European Community, and, finally, to the European Union. That's not to say that's not and interesting and important history lesson for people who are unfamiliar with EU history, but its not geographic! I was hoping for a book of theories explaining human events using reasoning built on spatial orientations or location. Why Geography Matters had some of that, but Blij could have, in my view, omitted much of the voluminous background information. Doing some would have made his book more concise and allowing his genuine insights to be featured more prominently.

And for what its worth, the book could have used a better editor. For instance, on p.160 it refers to "South Ossetia" as a Russian Republic instead of North Ossetia. I noticed a couple errors like this.

Perhaps, I would be more positive about this book if its last chapter hadn't been the low point. The chapter on Africa had absolutely nothing original to say (AIDS is bad, we need to do more to stop it; colonization and slavery were bad too; Africa has been plagued by bad leadership; etc.).

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