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A review by _walter_
Prisoners of Geography, Volume 1: Ten Maps That Explain Everything about the World by Tim Marshall
3.0
In terms of geography, I always considered myself at least competent, but along comes this book and it gives me a new way to look at terrain features, borders, and boundaries in such a way that they can be said to inform some of the conflicts we see and hear about in the world today - if you choose to believe the author's approach.
I'll confess that I totally geeked out on this book initially - so much so that I actually downloaded a bunch of highly detailed maps and spent way more time than I should have getting through its chapters, because I couldn't stop looking at the maps to doublecheck what the author was saying or if it made any sense at all. In that sense, it was an enjoyable read, at least for the first third or so... More on that later.
In my bookshelf, I'll have to place it next to Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Immerwarhr's "How to Hide an Empire", Gonzales' "Harvest of Empire", Takaki's "A Different Mirror", and Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". All of the aforementioned, for better or worse, have critically shaped my understanding of the world and of world events, and to a greater extent, U.S. foreign policy. Thus, a big part of my rating needs to reflect that.
Now, the book is most definitely not perfect and if you were to read some of the reviews here on GR, you'd come to the conclusion that if you are presumably not as well-read as others in the subject of geopolitics, then you will have a more favorable view of it, while those who are more well-versed will tear it apart and condemn it. So, before you pick this one up, ask yourself: "will this be a primer on geopolitics for me, or am I looking for something deeper?" Read on if you are the former, skip it if you are the latter.
So what are the issues? Aside from any particular portrayal of a people and their problems, of which there are many and whose treatment is considerably shallow and completely U.S. centric, let's say that it was in need of a good editor. Yeah, let's start there.
Marshall is so excited to tell you why your rivers suck, that he will not waste time organizing his chapters into logical subsections to help the reader more easily navigate his Joycesian paragraphs. You'd think that in a chapter discussing Asia, or Europe, as a someone using geography to explain things, you'd want to break the chapter down by region or country as you discourse along. But no, you will only get one massive chapter with no logical nor conceptual borders to speak of, so you just have to deal with one argument starting in Mongolia but ending in Malaysia. Remember those essays that English teachers used to have us write back in high school, where they gave you a list of words and told you to write a paragraph using all of them? Well, some of the chapters herein are like the adult version of that but with countries...
The book did keep me engaged during the first three chapters at least, where he spends more time talking about specific countries such as Russia, China, and the United States. Past this point, it gets increasingly muddled and confused as he goes on a trip of entire continents and tries to reconcile centuries of history and difficult conflicts into a geo-deterministic framework. It gets to be a tad procrustean by the time you reach Africa, I am afraid.
I will still recommend this book with varying degrees of reservation, based on who is asking, but I am not sure I will read any more of Marshall's books, at least for some time.
I'll confess that I totally geeked out on this book initially - so much so that I actually downloaded a bunch of highly detailed maps and spent way more time than I should have getting through its chapters, because I couldn't stop looking at the maps to doublecheck what the author was saying or if it made any sense at all. In that sense, it was an enjoyable read, at least for the first third or so... More on that later.
In my bookshelf, I'll have to place it next to Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Immerwarhr's "How to Hide an Empire", Gonzales' "Harvest of Empire", Takaki's "A Different Mirror", and Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". All of the aforementioned, for better or worse, have critically shaped my understanding of the world and of world events, and to a greater extent, U.S. foreign policy. Thus, a big part of my rating needs to reflect that.
Now, the book is most definitely not perfect and if you were to read some of the reviews here on GR, you'd come to the conclusion that if you are presumably not as well-read as others in the subject of geopolitics, then you will have a more favorable view of it, while those who are more well-versed will tear it apart and condemn it. So, before you pick this one up, ask yourself: "will this be a primer on geopolitics for me, or am I looking for something deeper?" Read on if you are the former, skip it if you are the latter.
So what are the issues? Aside from any particular portrayal of a people and their problems, of which there are many and whose treatment is considerably shallow and completely U.S. centric, let's say that it was in need of a good editor. Yeah, let's start there.
Marshall is so excited to tell you why your rivers suck, that he will not waste time organizing his chapters into logical subsections to help the reader more easily navigate his Joycesian paragraphs. You'd think that in a chapter discussing Asia, or Europe, as a someone using geography to explain things, you'd want to break the chapter down by region or country as you discourse along. But no, you will only get one massive chapter with no logical nor conceptual borders to speak of, so you just have to deal with one argument starting in Mongolia but ending in Malaysia. Remember those essays that English teachers used to have us write back in high school, where they gave you a list of words and told you to write a paragraph using all of them? Well, some of the chapters herein are like the adult version of that but with countries...
The book did keep me engaged during the first three chapters at least, where he spends more time talking about specific countries such as Russia, China, and the United States. Past this point, it gets increasingly muddled and confused as he goes on a trip of entire continents and tries to reconcile centuries of history and difficult conflicts into a geo-deterministic framework. It gets to be a tad procrustean by the time you reach Africa, I am afraid.
I will still recommend this book with varying degrees of reservation, based on who is asking, but I am not sure I will read any more of Marshall's books, at least for some time.