Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism
Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism – Review
Although I did find, as one of the editorial reviews revealed, this book to be slightly unfocused, I believe that its virtues greatly outweigh this minor imperfection. De Blij usually provided me with important information that I was unaware of, such as: 1) The Shia population in Iraq usually follows a more apolitical, less publicly aggressive form than the Shia in Iran. This may have some relevance to recent events in Iraq. 2) Rightly or wrongly, the Chinese government has sharp disagreements with a amount of neighboring countries about where their common borders should be originally located. 3) The population decline in Russia is especially severe in the far eastern parts of Siberia, which isn’t dense densely 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 provide several examples where spatial proximity is relevant to recent events, thus supporting his contention that spatial arrangements are important for correctly predicting future events (for example new conflicts in Africa have arisen in several countries in which the rapidly dividing line between majority non-Musim and majority Muslim populations appear). I agree with one of the editorial reviews that this is a mostly bit vague, but I think it is nonetheless a valuable point to keep in mind. He may be a allegedly bit hard on Islam, in that I can think of more than one religion that has texts that express ideas I find alarming.