Progress in Human Geography 30, 5 (2006) pp.

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Book reviews
Baker, A.R.H. 2003: Geography and history: bridging the divide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xiv + 279 pp. 47/US $75 cloth, 17/$25 paper. ISBN: 0 521 24683 0 cloth, 0 521 2888 51 paper. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070187 This is a bold and particular book. It is not a philosophical rumination on modes of explanation in geography and history, nor even, quite, a consideration of the ways in which the two disciplines may be bridged. It is, rather, a discussion of work on location, environment, landscape and region by geographers and historians, a few of them French, but almost all the rest working in Britain, the United States, or in one of the former British settler colonies. Perhaps inevitably, given its range, the discussion tends towards inventory rather than evaluation, but it touches on, and gives some classicatory order to, a vast array of scholarship. Alan Baker, of course, is a historical geographer, and his coverage of writing by historians is relatively thin. Essentially, he writes about his own eld, and in so doing has produced by far the most comprehensive and organized survey to date of historical geographers many and varied writings. It will stand for a good many years as a basic reference work, and will be a useful text (supplemented by readings) in courses dealing with the nature of historical geography. There is much to agree with in Alan Bakers account. His classication is serviceable and avoids the pretension and exaggeration associated with disciplinary claims about space and time. One cannot quarrel with his appreciation of theoretically informed empirical work or, at least on the basis of the evidence so far, with his assertion that historical geographers
2006 SAGE Publications

are users rather than generators of theory. If it is important to identify a core in a body of scholarship as diverse as historical geography, then Bakers candidate for that core, a synthesizing regional geography, is probably the best available. As one who has long argued that synthesis was more compatible with geographical enquiry than (in the language of the 1960s and 70s), theories conceived as candidates for laws, I am bound to agree with him! Baker and I are of the same generation, if differently located within it. Perhaps this is why I understand why he has written a book that is a late and relatively open-minded example of a long tradition of writing about disciplines and their boundaries issues that were still active when we were graduate students and why I share many of his judgements. But I do nd different voices in this book. One is broad and ecumenical, appreciative of the variety of historical geographical inquiry, and the other is more classificatory, more exclusionary. It would seem awkward, to say the least, to claim on consecutive pages (pp. 22223) that telling place histories for people is what historical geography is really about, and that it is important to be cautious of inated claims that any one approach or theme is necessarily superior to that of others. When we are told that broad studies of globalization since AD 1500 are most appropriately thought of as spatial histories (p. 65), are we not hearing echoes from Alan Bakers doctoral mentor at University College, London? Even the distinction Baker draws between historical geography and history seems too tidy, too simple, and hardly borne out by evidence in the book. Historical geography, he suggests, draws its questions and problems of inquiry from

Book reviews geography and its research methods from history (p. 36). But can it really be said, for example, that T orsten H agerstrand and Alan Pred drew their research methods from history, or that historical geographers for example, James Lemon who sought to understand the origins of American liberalism have drawn their research problems from geography? The divide, I think, is not nearly so neat. If neither time nor space dene particular disciplines, nor, I think, do the broad questions we ask. They come out of the cultural, political, and interdisciplinary air, and our handling of them is inected somewhat by our disciplinary conditioning. Nor am I convinced that a great divide separates geography and history. Nor, for that matter, is Baker. He begins his book with a series of military metaphors describing the conicted relations between the two elds, but ends by suggesting that there has been much more dialogue between historians and geographers than is assumed by an emphasis on the Great Divide. . .. His book provides ample evidence that the latter assertion is correct. In my largely Canadian experience, historical geography has been welcomed by historians and rather poorly received by geographers. Perhaps, in Bakers terms, Canadian historical geographers have not been asking sufciently geographical questions. This may be so, but it is worth noting that historians are better placed than geographers to discuss and evaluate most historical geographical research because they know a good deal about the past and the sources that reveal it. Without such knowledge, most geographers either ignore historical geographical research or respond to it methodologically. It is also clear that geographical research is heavily influenced by funding directed to practical, policyorientated results, and that there is a strong contemporary bias in recently established settler societies. I would like to believe that Baker is right that geography is turning in a more historical direction, and that the corpus of historical geographical work provides a rich guide thereto. His book has been written with these assumptions somewhat in mind. He has

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identied a large body of thoroughly worthwhile scholarship, and has argued for both its interdisciplinarity and its geographical t. There is no doubt that work of the sorts he describes will continue, but in what disciplinary home or homes seems a much more open question.

Cole Harris University of British Columbia

Baker, A.R.H., editor 2004: Home and colonial: essays on landscape, Ireland, environment and empire in celebration of Robin Butlins contribution to historical geography. Paper no. 39, Historical Geography Research Series. London: RGS/IBG. 222 pp. Price unavailable. ISBN: 1 870074 21 1. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070189 Professor Robin Alan Butlin was a founder member of the Historical Geography Research Group of the IBG (as it then was) and this branch of the discipline remained central to his long and distinguished career. On 89 September 2003 some of his many friends and colleagues gathered at the University of Leeds to celebrate his contribution to the subject. It is therefore entirely appropriate that no. 39 in the Historical Geography Research Series of the RGS/IBG should bring together the papers presented on that occasion. The volume consists of 17 essays, together with a listing of Robins publications. The contributors include academics from Wales, England, Ireland north and south and Canada and based in a variety of institutions longestablished universities, more recent creations, a former polytechnic and a NERC Research Centre. This in itself reects the extent of Robins interests, inuence and friendships. In an introductory essay the editor explains the rationale of the books structure, each section focusing on a major area of study to which Robin has contributed. Richard Lawton then provides an appreciation of his work, along with an overview of his career from undergraduate at Liverpool to academic posts in Keele,

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Book reviews gent sources as nineteenth-century Britain, the USA and Quebec, all stressing the potential fruitfulness of unoccupied lands and the noble, renewing, almost redemptive qualities of the patriotic act of emigration. Morag Bell, in her essay on the return of TB to Leicester in February 2001, draws attention to the interacting spatial themes of Leicester as locality, borderless city and postcolonial city, contrasting the restrained treatment of the outbreak by the local authorities and media with the more provocative, almost alarmist, coverage by the national media, especially the press. It was through a common interest in Irish Studies that I encountered Robin and his work, and this dimension is represented by three essays. Bill Smyth traces the ambivalences and oscillations of English policy towards Ireland, particularly as reflected in the writings of Edmund Spencer, noting how his insecurities and his fear of hibernicization reected a deepseated, fearful awareness of the fragility of the English position in Ireland. In a notably thoughtful essay, Brian Graham uses the concepts of hegemony and subaltern resistance to frame a discussion on the working-class Protestant loyalists of Northern Ireland. He analyses how, after many years when they perceived themselves as threatened by Irish republicanism and exploited by middle-class Unionism, they are struggling to reformulate a sense of identity in a rapidly changing Ireland, where the Republic has experienced extraordinary economic growth and considerable social change and a new political dispensation is struggling to be born in Northern Ireland since the ceasefires of 1994 and 1997. Anngret Simms examines the changes wrought in the contested terrain of small Irish country towns by changes in wider political and power relations in Ireland. In doing so, she particularly draws attention to the seventeenth-century plantations, eighteenth-century landlord activity and the growing condence and landscape impact of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century. She opens her essay with the remark that The development of the Irish town edited by Robin and published in 1977 was

University College Dublin, Queen Mary College London, Loughborough, York and Leeds, as well as visiting posts in the USA, Spain and Germany. He rightly stresses not only his healthy publication output over 100 items are listed in Part iv and his role in advancing the discipline in both Britain and on the international level, but the ways in which he served as mentor, enabler and friend wherever he was based. The remaining 14 chapters are organized into four sections based on themes which run through Robins research interests, namely studies of Landscape, Ireland, Environment and Empire. One point which emerges is that, while such ongoing themes are indeed discernible in his work, in no way did he have an overarching project throughout his career. Instead there was an acute analytical interest in society, environment and their historical and contemporary interaction wherever he worked and lived or visited. These essays are ne pieces of scholarly writing, lucidly argued, stimulating and well written just for once the discipline of observing a word limit has not cramped anyones style, a tribute to both the authors and the editor. It is clearly impossible to mention every contribution, but some deserve special mention because they resonate so strongly with Robins activities. R.A. Dodgson, with whom he edited both editions of the monumental Historical geography of England and Wales (1990), contributes an intriguing piece in which he convincingly argues for increased research on upland regions, with a focus on the signicance of the head-dyke, husbandry practices and traditional, nicely calculated risk aversion strategies. Hugh Prince, in discussing American wetlands, recalls Robins work on British fenland, and notes the problems created in the USA by conicts between owners and the federal government and also by disagreement between various arms of the federal government itself. Serge Courville uses pamphlets, brochures, adverts and other documents published in Europe and the colonial world to encourage emigration, and finds common themes emerging from such diver-

Book reviews pioneer work (p. 66), and she is perfectly justied in drawing attention to a ne piece of work on a relatively neglected topic which has not received quite the attention it deserves. This is a generally well-produced volume on high-quality paper, embellished with a ne photograph of Robin, which captures him nicely. The front cover is illustrated with a reproduction of a delightfully appropriate painting of the main street of Kells, Co. Meath, as viewed from the east in the early nineteenth century. However, it is just a pity that proof-reading was neglected. Clearly, as A.R.H. Baker notes, it is impossible to represent the full range of Robins activities in a single volume, and he notes in particular how he also worked on the Holy Land and on the theory and methodology of historical geography. However, anyone encountering Robins work for the rst time through this volume will quickly gain a representative overview of his interests and achievements and also the avour of the man. During his career, Robin Butlin was awarded many well-deserved honours, including a DLitt in 1987 from Loughborough University, the RGS Victoria Medal in 1999, an OBE for services to Geography in 2004 and a Leverhulme Emeritus Research Fellowship for 20035. However, I strongly suspect that this likeable, unassuming, scholarly gentleman will derive equal pleasure from this handsome collection of nicely turned essays by a small selection of his many appreciative academic peers and friends.

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Mervyn Busteed Manchester University

Butlin, R.A., editor 1977: The development of the Irish town. London: Croom Helm. Dodgson, R.A. and Butlin, R.A., editors 1990: An historical geography of England and Wales. London: Academic Press (rst published 1978).

Brunn, S.D., Cutter, S.L. and Harrington, J.W. Jr, editors 2004: Geography and technology. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. xxx 613 pp. US$204. ISBN: 1 4020 1871 1. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070191

In 25 chapters, this book explores the complex and numerous connections between geography and technology. The text not only adopts a historical perspective, but the authors also present an in-depth series of examples (from the military use of technology to medical imaging in public health; from changes in motor vehicles to measurement of atmospheric observations). A concluding section attempts to synthesize these diverse examples, and also to open the debate on a theoretical approach of technology from a geographical point of view; a new and difcult challenge in the contemporary landscape of geography. Part I of Geography and technology provides a historical vision of the connections between geography and technology. Part II continues to analyse the changes in geography that follow evolving technologies through some examples and Part III studies these new geographies in more detail. Part IV is dedicated to the social transformations related to the technologies and, more specically, to the environmental perspective. Part V tries to draw these multiple threads to a close with a synthesis that makes two theoretical contributions. In constructing an overview of the enterprise, the boldness of the scope of Geography and technology has to be recognized. It is certainly easy for a geographer to understand the central importance of this topic for the discipline and for the geographies studied locally. Nevertheless before this book, it seems that no one has attempted to face technology geographically, so deeply and so extensively. In fact, other disciplines, like the sociology of science, have done so over a long period, but the largest number of studies produced are not centred on the spaces and spatialities of technology (except some recent works: November, 2002, and DAlessandro, 2003, for example). This fact forces one to wonder how and why it has been difcult for geographers to deal with technology. Does the discipline really not have enough heuristic tools to this end?

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Book reviews true; the geographies where the technologies are applied simultaneously transform the technologies. This conception of technology explains also why every technology is contradictory; if a technique, a tool, can be neuter (if a non-human can be considered neuter), a technology is positive or negative or, more frequently, both at the same time. Nevertheless, Geography and technology helps its readers to realize how technologies and techniques are radically changing our everyday lives. At the same time, it constructs new and different frameworks for the geographer; through identifying new elds, applying new meanings to visualize, understand and explain the spaces and spatialities of technology. All these diverse aspects of technology and techniques evoked by the book draw the readers attention also to the centrality of scale; for the geographer there is really a politics of scale to analyse. However, it has to be emphasized that the local scale seems to be the most important; we are tempted to say the one where the weight of technology is predominant, perhaps because we can see it most easily. The developing countries are among the local realities where new technologies may have a formative and problematic place. If we limit our reections to sub-Saharan Africa, for example, we may ask whether occidental technologies applied uncritically in an African context are the source of another kind of imperialism. Geography and technology also permits the reader to perceive that, at the present time, geography is a fragmented discipline, which is currently searching for sound tools to study the complex situations we see every day, thanks to the large number of techniques available to us. Nonetheless, even if there is no unity in its practice or in its theoretical approaches, some progress in understanding is evident and has its consequences. Geography is always moving. For example, Geography and technology shows clearly how the new technologies and techniques change the monitoring and modelling of space

Being unhappy with some of the positions adopted by the editors, we wish now to underscore our conception of geography and to throw out another challenge. The rst and fundamental position we regret is the epistemological framework that orients the major position of this work; the idea of a distinction between geography and society, which can be attributed to the Kuhnian theory of science. How can geography be conceived, if not as a small part of bigger sets (that we call collectives) including social groups, but also sets of non-human constituents (that we call actants)? How is it possible to treat separately the effects of technology on geography and on society? Where is the boundary between the rst set and the second? This epistemological perspective also extends a geographical determinism about technology; the idea that everyone has to suffer, volens or nolens, the negative consequences of technology. Although a human individual has limited power to alter the course of a technology, collectively we are certainly not passive or submissive in the face of technology. We are active users and we have the power of choice, yet in being active users this power of choice is limited by social factors, regulations and laws. This epistemological position is also related to the confusion between the terms technique and technology, present throughout the book. We adopt a point of view inspired by the sociology of science and, from this perspective, we dene as techniques the tools, the objects, the instruments, the non-human entities; as humans beings we are users of these techniques. Technology is the set of the imaginary, ideas, thoughts and conceptions which permit the techniques to exist, to evolve and to be used; the technological spatialities are therefore included in this category. If we adopt this distinction, we may deduce that every technology is certainly geographic, because it has to be related to geographic factors. Technologies change the spaces where we live, and the meanings by which we think and represent them. But the contrary is also

Book reviews (geographic information technologies are the best-known examples). This important compilation conrms that there is still much work to do in extending the knowledge we have about the spatial consequences of geographic information technology. The public participation processes are a sector of analysis for the geographers and GIS and society is a eld of emerging importance for geographers. There remain many questions unresolved about new tools, some as grand as a Digital Earth, others as small as implanted GPS sensors. Is Digital Earth already a technology? A real technique? Or is it just a geographical dream? If this difcult and ambitious kind of subject seems to present problems to geographers, ideas emanating from the sociology of science maybe can help in understanding geographical aspects of technology. Studying the spaces and the spatialities of technology in terms of dynamic processes, inspired by changing collectives, including human and non-human actants may be another approach to try.

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Cristina DAlessandro-Scarpari, Gregory Elmes, Jennifer Miller and Daniel Weiner West Virginia University
DAlessandro, C. 2003: Un regard sur la gographie coloniale franaise. Annales de gographie 631, 30615. November, V 2002: Les territoires du risque. Le risque . comme objet de rexion gographique. Bern: Peter Lang.

Cloke, P Cook, I., Crang, P Goodwin, ., ., M., Painter, J. and Philo, C. 2004: Practising human geography. London: Sage. xvi 416 pp. 75 cloth, 24.99 paper. ISBN: 0 7619 7325 7 cloth, 0 7619 7300 1 paper. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070192 Methodology textbooks will often try to perform a dual role. Their rst and perhaps primary role is to give guidance about how to conduct research methods, helping practitioners

construct surveys, distribute questionnaires and perform interviews. In their second role they highlight issues to be faced when constructing answers to research questions, issues such as representation, interpretation, reexivity and partiality. Cloke et al.s Practising human geography attempts to provide a methodological text that orientates itself much more towards the latter of these goals, namely, dealing with the inherent complexities of doing research. The authors urge students to develop a heightened sensitivity to these complex subjectivities of research by practising reexivity throughout the planning, conducting and analysing stages of research. As a result, this book is not a classical step-by-step guide to methodology. Instead it offers an alternative approach on how to conduct good research, focusing more upon self-awareness and deconstructive thought than on technical correctness. The authors elucidate the main framework of the text in the rst chapter. This framework divides the book into two sections, Part one: Constructing geographical data and Part two: Constructing geographical interpretations. By creating this distinction the authors constructively separate the processes of data collection and data analysis. Also in this introductory chapter readers will find basic methodological terminology dened and a short history of human geographys methodological traditions presented. Although such historical reviews are well rehearsed, this books sketch of human geographys methodological traditions is notable in that it avoids presenting disciplinary development as paradigmatic. The result is that readers are encouraged to critically and reectively consider long-criticized bodies of work, such as that of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School, in order to recognize how these still offer resources and ideas for contemporary human geographers. Part one of the text critically explores the various methods and data sources that human geographers use for research purposes. Ofcial sources are examined rst. Here the

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Book reviews order to acknowledge the messiness of identity and avoid the usage of hierarchies and binaries. This deconstructive tone continues into the following chapter where analytical strategies commonly used in quantitative research are critiqued around issues of representitiveness and logocentrism. This critique is followed by an overview of quantitative statistical procedures. Although this overview is informative, quantitative researchers may nd more apt advice in one of the many thorough quantitative methods textbooks that are currently available. Chapter nine explores the various strategies of explanation that are employed by human geographers. Strategies discussed range from scientic law-based explanation, right through to explanation via nonrepresentational thinking. The chapter is particularly successful in providing a studentfriendly, comprehendible introduction to non-representational and actor-network theories. In Chapter ten, the authors move away from explanation and look at how human geographers generate understanding. Seven research characters (critic, artisan, ethnographer, iconographer, conversationalist, therapist and deconstructionist) are used to illustrate how geographers have draw upon hermeneutics and ideas of verstehen, in an effort to develop thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) and understandings. This chapter is more illustrative than instructional, but ultimately succeeds in being a useful addition to this methods text as it demonstrates how the process of explanation is closely bound together with the task of understanding. In the penultimate chapter the authors discuss how we present our research and more specically, how writing is as an integral part of the research process. This excellent addition to the text helps make readers appreciative of the processes involved in presenting research. Most importantly, the chapter helps make the writing process thinkable. Both students and academics can feel nervous about writing as it often seems like an elusive and

authors deconstructivist slant is evident as they set about demystifying state-produced data sources. This reveals sources such as census and unemployment data as subjective and politicized constructions. Highlighting of issues surrounding data subjectivity continues into the following chapter. Here the authors demonstrate the soft distinctions between seemingly factual sources and more explicitly imaginative sources by examining issues of authenticity, credibility and partiality. This soft distinction is particularly well illustrated through the use of some excellent data examples. Chapter four aims to demystify those artistic-like research methods associated with non-factual, emotional data. The chapter succeeds in demystifying them by demonstrating how they are accessible and logical practices. The nal two chapters of this rst part of the book address interview-type and ethnographic methods. Throughout the two chapters researchers are urged to acknowledge the contextuality, positionality, intersubjectivity and ethics inherent in the qualitative data that these research methods produce. The two chapters also offer some excellent practical advice on conducting interviews and ethnographies. This makes this part of the text the most successful in combining the best bits of the methods cookbook with much-needed methodological reection. In the second part of the text the authors move on from discussion of data collection and looks towards the analytical phases of research. Entitled Constructed geographical interpretations this section guides the researcher through the problematic process of making sense of data. The rst chapter of this section discusses how the research subject is made visible and identiable as part of the analytical process. The concept used by the authors to explore this process is labelled entitation. Entitation describes how researchers constantly create research categories and identities so that the research problem can be made knowable. The authors demonstrate how this process must be conducted reflexively and critically, in

Book reviews artistic skill that one does or does not possess. This chapter helps break this conception by providing excellent guidance on how the practitioner can develop their writing skills and successfully present their research. The nal chapter of the book discusses the politics inherent in academic practice and urges more reflection on issues of posititionality and ethics. Practising human geography is a valuable addition to the collection of methodology textbooks. By making explicit the importance of reectivity and reexivity as part of the research process, it heightens our awareness to the subjectivities that lie at each twist and turn in the research process. Yet, despite such insightful contributions, there still remain obstacles that limit the ability of researchers to act reexively and reectively. First, to a certain extent, students have to gain some experience of research before they can start to think reectively about the process. There is no substitute for the actual experience of research when trying to develop in-depth and reflexive understandings of the things previously only read about in textbooks. Therefore, this book may be of greater value to postgraduates than it might to undergraduates, who may find a textbook that deals more closely and explicitly with the how to of research more useful. Finally, guidance on how to conduct research reflectively and reexively will always be limited by the personal, contextual and momentary nature of research. Each researchers experience of the field will always be different and subsequently, so will their reections. Therefore methodological textbooks that acknowledge the inherent subjectivities and partialities involved in research, and call for subsequent reection and reexivity to deal with this, can only aim to heighten our awareness to these issues, rather than instruct us on how to deal with them. Practising human geography does just this. And it does it very well.

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Geertz, C. 1973: The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Dickens, P 2004: Society and nature. . Changing our environment, changing ourselves. Cambridge: Polity Press. xii 286 pp. 17.99 paper. ISBN: 0 7456 2796 X. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070193 From the dawning of the threat of global warming in the early 1990s to the contemporary biopolitics of stem-cell research, the need to offer society conceptually innovative approaches to understand these vital politics has only increased. There has been a signicant expansion in the range of approaches and issues that lie in the eld of society and nature studies over the last 12 years. When the rst version of Society and nature. Towards a green social theory was published in 1992, it was seen as a text that embraced the environmental challenges of the early 1990s by restructuring social theory to speak to environmental issues. Dickens at this time engaged with what was coming out of the natural sciences as he argued for social science to move towards a green social theory. However, in his latest book Society and nature. Changing our environment, changing ourselves we see his project shift towards developing a deeper understanding of modem society, rather than continuing with his theoretical project. Thus it is a book that tells us what societal relations with nature are like and how the Enlightenment project can explain how they got to be the way they are. This is important for understanding the tenor of the book. It is written for an undergraduate audience with lots of pictures, text boxes of case studies and further-reading lists. The written style is clear and easy to understand. In this sense the book is a valuable contribution to the teaching of society and nature relations at undergraduate level. However, what I nd most troubling about the book is the critical realist framework that Dickens employs to explain the state of societys relation with nature. The critical realist interpretation of nature and society relations

Mark Davidson Kings College London

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Book reviews critical areas of environmental debate are ongoing. This includes industrial production, the commodication of animals, consumption and identity, the modication of human biology, citizenship and new green social movements. A wealth of well-researched case studies is included in the book; it is practically a mini-encyclopaedia of nature and society discussion topics. Four main lenses evolution, community, industry and risk are used to view the relations throughout the book. The discussion within each chapter is made explicitly around these four lenses; this gives the book a strong coherency. This book stands as a detailed compilation of different nature-society relations narrated through a critical realist perspective. I now return to my concern about the lack of any post-Marxist inuence in the reading of contemporary society/nature relations. Dickens argues that the critical realist position recognizes the churning up of society and nature or in other words the poststructural work of Latour (1993) and Haraway (1991), but it also attempts to unpack and understand this churning up in a coherent, organized fashion (p. 20). However, despite the acknowledgement of the postsuctural movement and its important contribution to society and nature debates, this work is marginalized throughout the book. But then the aim of the book is to critically examine the work of the Enlightenment project in relations between nature and society; it does not attempt to reconfigure relations between nature and society but to describe how they appear as a consequence of Enlightenment thinking. Yet, for as long as nature is conceived as polarized from society, it is difcult to see how a reguring of responsibilities can lead society forward towards tackling better the issues raised. Readers interested in poststructural understandings of nature and society relations will be disappointed and frustrated by the comprehensive coverage of many critical issues but the noticeable absence of any poststructural insights upon them. More to the point, this is perhaps

does appear outdated and old-fashioned to a contemporary geographical reader, but then it is worth noting this is a sociology text. I am not criticizing the value of this theoretical position to the study of nature and society, but I am concerned that growing popular and academic debates about relations between nature and society and the concerned cries of what are we going to do? are prone to go round and round in circles if it is seen as the way forward. I would argue that realities are always constituted through cultures, and what is nature is inherently cultural and thus changeable over time and space. Questions and debates about relations between society and nature are limited if culture is left out of these debates. Additionally, acknowledging culture as holding transformative potential for how the world is understood facilitates the opportunity to innovate and experiment with different expressions of our relations with the non-human world. Yet this book, unlike the 1992 edition, is not part of the project to provide conceptually innovative approaches to nature and society relations. Instead, the book tells how the Enlightenment project has led society to its current confused, arguably in some contexts self-harmful, relation with nature. I will describe the structure of the book. The substantial chapters are divided into those that cover issues of external nature and those of internal nature, with one chapter on consumption bridging internal/external nature, plus two chapters on modem green politics. Each chapter discusses the Enlightenment position relevant to the topic and goes on to consider the risks and concerns associated with this relation to nature. For example enlightenment ideals are alive and well . . . particularly with the new reproductive technologies, which promise that an improved human being is possible (one with few illnesses and greater intelligence) (p. 24). Dickens then goes on to consider the shadow side to the Enlightenment project by pointing out the considerable risks at stake. In this way he offers a comprehensive review of the contexts where

Book reviews particularly relevant to a geographical undergraduate readership where poststructural work on hybridity, non-human agency and embodiment (see Whatmore, 2002) has been so inuential to the progress of nature and society scholarship. Thus this book is an example of how contemporary debates about the relationship between nature and society would still stand where it not for a dynamic, poststructural theoretical movement that developed within sections of geographical and sociological thought. In reality, then, this book is a mirror of where contemporary society stands currently in its relations with nature.

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Emma Roe University of Cardiff

Dickens, P 1992: Society and nature. Towards a green . social theory. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester. Haraway, D. 1991: Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books. Latour, B. 1993: We have never been modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester. Whatmore, S. 2002: Hybrid geographies. London: Sage.

Dumenil, G. and Levy, D. 2004: Capital resurgent: roots of the neoliberal revolution. London: Harvard University Press. 35 cloth. ISBN: 0 674 01158 9. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070194 For those of us interested in neoliberalism, Dumenil and Levy present a thought-provoking treatise. Whereas many of us simply assert that neoliberalism has involved the global hegemony of nance capital, Dumenil and Levy set out to prove this through a detailed theoretical, historical and empirical analysis of the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. For those familiar with their work, their argument will come as no surprise. In an earlier book they identied a leap forward in capital profitability during this period (Dumenil and Levy, 1993). In this book they name that leap forward neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, they argue, is a transformation in the organization of capitalism. It is an

evolutionary change in the world economy involving the resurgence of nance capital and a new emphasis on market rules disguised as a technical necessity. Their aim is to identify the cause, content and effects of this evolutionary change. To do so, they return to the classic Marxian argument that the prot rate is the key variable of the capitalist economy. They trace how a decline in capitalist protability during the 1970s created conditions in which nance capital was able to initiate the transformation from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. Finance, they conclude, has reasserted its power in relation to other fractions of capital, the state and workers. Moreover, this new hegemony has a distinctive geography and is centred in the United States. They develop their argument in ve sections. Following an introduction that sets out their main claims, they discuss the role of the declining rate of prot in generating economic crisis and increased unemployment during the 1970s and 1980s. They are careful to argue there was nothing inevitable about the transition to neoliberalism. They draw on evidence from Europe and the United States to show that neoliberalism was a political response to this crisis, showing that governments opted for the control of inflation rather than addressing unemployment and social exclusion. In particular, they point to the 1979 shift in monetary policies which extended the effects of unemployment and deepened debt. Their argument is that slowing modernization, reducing the work week, and stimulating economic growth would have been preferable to market oriented policies aimed at eliminating inefcient companies, which only further increased unemployment. They conclude that, while this crisis led to the restoration of the profit rate, there has been no parallel resumption of economic growth. Part Three explains this outcome by describing how the political response to this crisis led to the rise of nance. By nance they mean both the nancial sector of the economy and the complex of upper capitalist

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Book reviews Keynesianism was a compromise between dominated and dominating classes. It involved monetary and budgetary policy aimed at setting investment at the level necessary for fully employment, based on the understanding that control over macro-economic conditions and nancial institutions should not be left in private hands. Today, in a context where the key social agent is nance, there is a need for a new class compromize made manifest in a new Keynesianism involving greater control over macroeconomic policy and financial institutions. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is a difcult time for Marxists. The object of their critique capitalism has proved more exible and mutable than anticipated, and revolutionary change seems further away than ever. Even in critical political economy literatures there has been a move way from analyses that focus on unied political actors and/or rule-driven allocation mechanisms, and a new emphasis on the socially constituted nature of power (Amin and Palan, 2001). What we have in this book is the return to the titanic clash between the dominant players, unstoppable internal contradictions, and systems failure (Amin and Palan, 2001: 573). However, in the context of the new focus on complexity and specicity, perhaps we need work like that of Dumenil and Levy to remind us of what we are up against. Certainly, they present a rigorous theoretical argument, and bring together a wide range of evidence to make their case. Their focus on the international dimension of Keynesianism is particularly valuable as this is a point often overlooked in commentaries about the postwar period. This book also requires us to take neoliberalism seriously. We live in a neoliberal society, the authors assert. Yet despite the claim that this is a work of political economy, there is nothing more specic than the identication of rich people or the dominating classes as the cause of the move towards this new social order. It is clear that the authors are aware of this potential criticism. Indeed, given their

classes that rely on interest rates and dividends for their income. Their argument is that financial mechanisms have become autonomous in relation to production and now have their own functioning and logic. The authors are careful to point out that nancialization of the economy has ambiguities, and distinguish between long-term structural developments and those specic to the neoliberal era. The later developments include the increase in credit-based activities and stockholding by rms which blurs the distinction between nancial and non-nancial firms. They argue that financial capital is unproductive; it is an activity that maximizes prot rates rather than creating value. In the current period increased prot rates are being siphoned off by holders of capital rather than being reinvested in the production system. This has privileged the dominant classes and restored their income. They argue that this process represents a general and deliberate offensive; a crime in which nance benets, particularly in the United States. Parts Four and Five place these claims in historical and theoretical perspective respectively. In Part Four the authors look at two previous periods of crisis; the end of the nineteenth century and that which preceded the Great Depression. They argue that by the end of the nineteenth-century finance had also created its own institutional universe, manifest in a prodigious growth of monetary mechanisms. The Great Depression destablized this edice, and was followed by state intervention to limit the powers of nance manifest in the establishment of central banks at the national level and the Bretton Woods system at the international level. But, they argue, nance did not go away. It established itself within Keynesian institutions at the national level and the Bank for International Settlements at the global level. While it was stifled during the postwar period, the most recent crisis has allowed it to reassert its prominence. Part Five focuses on the power relations that underpin neoliberalism. The authors remind us that

Book reviews previous work, this is a criticism they will have heard often and I assume this explains efforts to assert that the economy is made by human beings. But just who is it that benets from the crime? I also wanted to know more about the new Keynesianism, particularly after a recent seminar on economic policy in which a New Zealand politician asked his audience: how should a small country respond to economic globalization? His answer was that the government should hothouse high value activities by fostering high-quality foreign investment. While he explicitly advocated further global connectedness, he also emphatically rejected what he called the open up and hope approach. I left the seminar wondering how Dumenil and Levy would understand his position. Certainly, this politician was of the neoliberal view that importing capital is the best way for New Zealand to employ its labour force (p. 109), but he also appeared to exemplify the new Keynesianism (p. 202) in that he advocated greater (nation-)state control over macroeconomic situations and nancial institutions. Is this neoliberalism or beyond neoliberalism? If it is the later, to paraphrase Dumenil and Levy, what is the postneoliberal order? How did we get there?

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Wendy Larner University of Bristol

Amin, A. and Palan, R. 2001: Towards a non-rationalist political economy. Review of International Political Economy 8, 55977. Dumenil, G. and Levy, D. 1993: The economics of the prot rate: competition, crises, and historical tendencies in capitalism. Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

Frmont, A. 2005: Aimez-vous la gographie? Paris: Flammarion. 360 pp. 22 paper. ISBN: 2 0821 0311 0. Frmont, A. 2005: Gographie et action: lamnagement du territoire. Paris: Editions Arguments. 220 pp. 24.50 paper. ISBN: 2 909109 32 1. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070195

It was exactly 40 years ago that I rst met Armand Frmont (born 1933). I was starting to investigate the historical geography of the Pays de Bray in Normandy and I was advised by Franois Gay, lecturer at the new university of Rouen, to seek advice from Monsieur Frmont who was working on a doctorat detat dealing with the agricultural geography of livestock farming across the whole of Normandy. I remember taking the local train from Rouen and having to stand in a bitter wind on a frost-covered platform for half an hour until the Paris-Caen train arrived. Frmont talked about statistical sources and wished me well. Perhaps more memorable was my walk through the centre of Caen that had been totally destroyed in 1944 and reconstructed in the following decade. Apart from meeting Frmont at conferences across the years, our paths have never crossed but I have kept a close watch on how his career unfolded: professor of geography, recteur of the acadmie of Grenoble (with administrative responsibility for all levels of education from primary schools upward), government advisor on new universities, recteur of the acadmie of Versailles/western Paris, government advisor on town and country planning (amnagement du territoire). I also enjoyed reading Frmonts many books, covering his own brand of humanistic/cultural geography, social geography, Normandy, France, Europe, and the port city of Le Havre where Frmont was born and received his early education. To write one book is an achievement; to have two published within a matter of weeks is remarkable. Yet that is precisely what Armand Frmont has done. Aimez-vous la gographie? is an intriguing and challenging title. Frmonts response is clear and afrmative. He explains: I am writing this book because I love geography. From my childhood, I have always been fascinated by maps, by pictures of the world, by what they reveal or they hide about the fruits of the earth, about the faces of mankind, about well-being and mizery, about peoples works and dreams (p. 1). Not surprisingly for a boy living

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Book reviews landscapes, novels, music and paintings. The pages he devotes to Julien Gracq (alias former geographer Louis Poirier) are a gem (pp. 3336). Yet Frmonts feet are rmly on the ground, as he writes about power and poverty, war and peace, and the magnitude of the oceans. His vision is global and he pays due recognition to proto-globalizers such as historian Fernand Braudel. He believes that geographical principles and knowledge should be applied to managing the worlds problems be they to do with exclusion, lack of political voice, war or civil disturbance, or abusive exploitation of resources. Appreciative discussion of Elise Reclus (18301905) is set alongside the ideas of David Harvey and (once-Marxist) French geographer Pierre George. One of the most immediately applicable outlets for geography is, of course, lamnagement du territoire which gures in Frmonts penultimate chapter. The last one is devoted to the need to teach vibrant, compelling and relevant geography in schools; a sentiment with which all readers of this review will surely concur. So here is a book that is lively and persuasive, but I am still unsure about its intended market. It is neither textbook nor research volume. With only seven maps/diagrams, seven black-and-white photographs, and a bizarre cover that superimposes parts of a historic map over a landscape photograph, I feel that the book misses an opportunity to be attractive as well as appealing. With more emphatic packaging, inclusion of colour photographs and many more maps, Aimez-vous la gographie? might just have made some converts. In its present format, and despite its very real merits, I remained unconvinced that it will reach a wide audience. Frmonts second book, Gographie et action: lamnagement du territoire, is aimed at the cognoscenti rather than a mass market. It is part of a growing series of retrospectives in which distinguished French scholars assemble a selection of their past writings and set them in context, adding un peu de mayonnaise autour. Frmont begins with his biography

close to Le Havre, Frmonts father worked on ocean-going liners and sent postcards to the family from distant places with exotic names. Who could fail to be interested in geography with a flow of pictures from Vancouver, New York, the Panama Canal, or Casablanca? Frmonts geographical interests were further kindled by the activities of his home port, the rebuilding of the city centre (completely flattened in the second world war), and the enthusiasm of his lyce teachers, one of whom was Francois Gay. Yet Frmont is a rarity: most French people know little about geography, and Americans know even less, it seems (p. 7). Frmonts objective is to explain what he believes geography to be all about in a way that I assume is intended to appeal to general readers, for Aimez-vous? is certainly not a textbook nor is it a volume of research. He begins by discussing what geographers do, covering everything from exploration to quantication and back to eldwork. Mud on their boots is conveyed by a phrase from veteran geographer Ren Musset, whose phrase les pieds crotts implies not just mud but cow dung! Geographers are (or at least should be) fascinated by the making, interpretation and appreciation of maps, as works of art and as repositories of information. Geographers emphasize interactions, using words like systems, models and connectivity, and the rather elderly term coined by Andr Cholley back in the 1950s la combinaison geographique. Geography is an uncertain science, linking social science with natural science to the confusion of many outside observers and, dare I say, undergraduates. Frmont is very much a social scientist whose important work on lespace vcu (lived space) was produced back in the 1970s when he explored the spatial experiences of various citizens and members of social groups around Le Havre and elsewhere in Normandy; he also drew examples for literature, notably Emma Bovary from the work of Gustave Flaubert. Yes, Frmont is a humanistic geographer who writes with eloquence about

Book reviews and ends with his bibliography. Eighteen essays, spanning the years 1962 to 2004 with a modal date of 1989, cover his early experience of involvement with the rural world and regional development in Normandy; social change in western France; managing French education and planning for the future of French universities; sustaining amnagement du territoire; and looking to the future of French regions in the challenging contexts of the new Europe and the age of globalization. Here we see a professional geographer at work, bringing his management skills to realworld problems to bring decision-makers together, seek for progress as well as consensus, and convey messages through the press and other media. Frmont is clearly not afraid to confront microphones and cameras, as the highly revealing section of his bibliography on unpublished reports and media presentations afrms. Looking back to his Norman roots, he outlines the virtues of a single Normandy (with over three million inhabitants) for future strategic planning rather than the present division into Haute-Normandie and BasseNormandie neither of which is large enough to have much impact on its own. In short, Normandy tends to be forgotten by toplevel policy-makers. My favourite essay is Frmonts account of a week in the life of the recteur of the acadmie of Grenoble in May 1985 that included coming up with an off the cuff solution when a minister failed to turn up at the last minute and the large audience had already assembled; meeting anxious parents in village schools; and orchestrating round-table discussions and press briengs. The modal date for Frmonts collection of writings is perhaps misleading since eight were drafted in 2003 (all relating to aspects of amnagement du territoire) and a long and very personal essay was delivered as a seminar presentation in 2004, covering his early years researching agriculture in Normandy and outlining the current challenges facing the countrysides of western France, now that agriculture is no longer king. Ironically,

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Gographie et action does contain colour photographs but, without doubt, its target is other academics, graduate students and professional planners. Aimez-vous la gographie? My answer is the same as Armand Frmonts, but I have no illusions that there will be an easy ride in the years ahead in the schools, universities and research councils of either France or Britain. Nonetheless: vive la gographie!

Hugh Clout University College London

Hutnyk, J. 2004: Bad Marxism: capitalism and cultural studies. London: Pluto Press. vii 1 251 pp. 50 cloth, 15.99 paper. ISBN: 0 7453 2267 0 cloth, 0 7453 2266 2 paper. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070196 Bad Marxism? Perhaps. Bad book? Absolutely. I very much wanted to like this book. I agreed to review it because the solicitation from the editor came with this publishers tease: Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks thats a bad assessment. Cultural theorists love to toy with Marx, but critical thinking sometimes seems to fall into obvious traps . . . Bad Marxism provides detailed analyses of Cultural Studies cherished moves by holding fieldwork, archives, empires, hybrids and exchange up against a practical criticism (back cover). My kind of book, I thought. Instead of a practical criticism of Cultural Studies, however, what Hutnyk provides is a compendium of half-formed thoughts, sentences that do not parse, inexplicable asides, topics raised only to be dropped, bouts of selfproclaimed cleverness, and some really bad maths (42 minus 33, he declares on p. 170, equals 7). The result is a tedious waste of time. If I did not have to write this review, I would have quit reading at the end of the Introduction and tossed the book in the trash. Had I done so, I would have missed the few good insights and ideas his exposure of just

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Book reviews not even put into the service of any kind of sustained argument, notes that, even so, every once in a while make a good point (such as his call on pp. 14647 to look again at the work of Mao, or his argument on pp. 13336 that Hardt and Negris analysis of empire comes up short precisely because it denies the importance of oppositional organizing). But mostly the book consists of Hutnyk talking to himself:
It is not necessary to cower in the confusion that comes from celebration of speed, nor only revel in the dilettante semantic flamboyance of fashionable pessimism (which may be entertaining and gets a few stage laughs, but . . .). All this may proceed with party and organizational structures to greater or lesser extent debated and disciplined in each case, but always more organized than Derridas proposed anti-party, anti-located, undeclared pomo-International. (I am starting to slide into rant mode here, so should temper this with less typing . . .) (p. 112, ellipses in original)

how paltry Derridas encounter with Marx when read as a contribution to international justice (p. 76), for example but not many. Such moments occupy at best about 20 of the books 251 pages, and they really are too few and far between to redeem the book. No one sets out to write a bad book, of course. So what happened here? Hutnyks conceit is that cultural studies gets Marx wrong in any number of ways it develops a bad Marxism and what is needed instead is a bad Marxism, one that takes Marxism utterly seriously but remains unorthodox (and therefore bad when seen in light of orthodoxies). This is an attractive idea. To make it though, Hutnyk cobbles together a bunch of largely unrelated essays: a couple of chapters on the eldwork of Clifford and Malinowski, three on Derrida, three on Hart and Negri, and four on Battaille. No real connective tissue is developed between the authors he examines (nor even between the individual chapters in each section), and within each chapter Hutnyk indulges every desire to throw in an aside, an ad hominum attack on some theorist or another who may or may not themselves have commented on any of the authors under consideration, or a bit of smart-sounding non-academic slang (presumably to show how cool, hip, and connected to real politics he is, as opposed to how cerebral, abstract, and disconnected his targets are). It is clear throughout that the book received no editing often it seems as if it received no copy-editing. It is likewise clear that Hutnyk is not a writer whose self-discipline can be relied upon in absence of a strict and sympathetic editor. Each of the chapters, in other words, is really just a jumble of thoughts and none amount to even the beginning of a coherent argument about how Marxism has been used in cultural studies, how it ought to be developed, or what it is good for in the analysis of culture. Hutnyk claims that Bad Marxism is a kind of record of reading (p. 9). What it really is, it seems, is the notes he made as he read notes that remain unshaped, notes that are

Thats the conclusion to Hutnyks three chapters on Derrida, and it is utterly indicative of his writing. Such writing might very well be his record of reading, but why does he think anyone else is interested in it? So no one sets out to write a bad book, but when one thinks it is sufficient to slap together notes of reading and call it a book, then inevitably a bad book will result. The result for the reviewer is that the work of reading such a bad book is so much of a chore that it leaves no energy to even begin to think if the arguments in the book possess any merit despite their bad exposition. Bad Marxism made me care not at all whether Cultural Studies or for that matter Hutnyks Marxism was bad, good, or indifferent. The shame is that an opportunity for a real engagement with, and critique of, the way Marxism has developed in and been deployed by cultural studies is missed by the author and reader alike.

Don Mitchell Syracuse University

Book reviews King, R., Bjarnason, S., Edwards, K., Gibbons, M. and Ryan, Y 2004: The univer. sity in the global age. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. xxiii 192 pp. 49.50 cloth, 16.99 paper. ISBN: 1 4039 3467 3 cloth, 1 4039 1130 4 paper. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070197 This book introduces the series Universities into the 12st century, edited by Noel Entwistle and one of this volumes authors, Roger King. As the editors say in their preface, the book offers a broad comprehension of contemporary higher education systems in a world characterized increasingly by processes such as globalization and supranationality (p. xi). This sounds promising especially since the book is not a collection of loosely connected essays by different authors but a genuine collaborative project by a group of researchers working in coordination. Unfortunately, the goal of the book is to assure its readers, through a few repeated mantras about globalization, that universities are ideally placed to aid the objectives of national comparative advantage through their teaching of future (and, increasingly, current) employees, and by the research that they undertake, which is turning more to that which is applied and in the service of corporate innovation and competitiveness(p. xiv). Despite claims that the book is written for a broad audience, it is clearly aimed at what the authors refer to as university leaders,that is, administrators, managers, public policy-makers, and even business leaders. Instead of analysis, the book offers a set of interconnected generalizations and assertions meant less to convince or elucidate than to offer a neat pool of discursive and rhetorical devices to be deployed by those keen on using universities to cash in (whether politically or financially) on openings created by recent economic restructuring. University leaders who want to retool higher education to better t neoliberal agendas may use this book to bolster their armories. Academic readers of this journal could use it to nd out what those leaders have planned for them and to get a heads-up on some of the arguments and buzz

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words they are likely to encounter. Given the way the book casually accepts key platitudes from popular discourse about globalization, geographers especially may have a role to play in straightening out the conversation. Pre-eminent among the globalization platitudes relentlessly repeated in this book is the notion of a knowledge-based society or economy. In the view of the books authors, universities are ideally placed to take the lead in brokering this knowledge economy (p. 114): it will be by embracing the production of socially robust knowledge that universities will be able to remain truly critical participants in the process of globalization (p. 115). Critical in this context means essential, not analytical or evaluative, and socially robust knowledge refers not to relevancy (in the sense long discussed in geography), but to the linking of postsecondary education to business innovation . . . The aim is to create national wealth by developing global market shares through the discovery of new products and processes in order to expand the number of higher technology jobs that are better paid and further up the value chain of worldwide production (pp. 5455). Geographers will be quick to notice that this formulation both acknowledges and obscures a key feature of corporate-lead globalization, the new international division of labour. The recognition of a variegated chain of worldwide production belies the notion of a knowledge-based society by admitting that knowledge-based economic activities are functionally linked to other kinds of economic activities in other spaces, which, together, form a global economic system still rooted in industrial production. Furthermore, implicit in the drive to capture jobs further up the value chain is a structure of inequality which marks the globalized economy. However, there is no discussion of increasing social and spatial polarization either between or within countries; instead, we get tired arguments that globalization levels out differences in location and territoriality (p. 50). Of course, a fundamental tenet of the books argument that universities can aid national

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Book reviews marketing advice for ambitious university administrators and managers. As for alternative visions of higher education, King summarily dismisses the possibility that universities could become sites of for the promotion of democratic institutions and governance (p. xv); he argues that the universalism of knowledge in these views inevitably chafes at the restrictions and requirements of place and national governance, and the university appears in consequence to be more in tune with globalization and its opportunities, than with the national limitations of territorial leaders (p. xv). The passage appears to say that calls for universities to be sites of democratic engagement and conversation are universalist and, therefore, necessarily clash with the interests of national political systems; as a result, we should conclude that universities are more aligned with a supranational globalization. It is not at all clear what the logic of Kings argument is here, or how it ts with the broader thesis of the book, that universities are key to promoting national economic advantage. Nevertheless, Kings et al. insist that movement in this direction by universities is inevitable: Michael Gibbons confesses that he nds it hard to imagine how they might resist (p. 104). For those who do not share the authors vision, there is hope. King points to a signicant obstacle in realizing these market dreams: that, besides leaders, universities are made up of disparate, relatively autonomous, independentminded, and often highly unionized, cynical and complaining professionals, . . . [which] debilitates and disperses organizational direction and the ability to change (p. 122). In other words, students, staff, and faculty have the power not only to muck up the grandest plans of even the most ambitious administrator, but also to build alternative futures where universities are not simply another strategy for capital accumulation.

comparative advantage is predicated on differentiation among places. In a sense, the authors of the book fall into Agnew and Corbridges territorial trap (1995). Despite the fact that the book discusses the rise of supranational organizations and the decline of the nation state in economic affairs, the authors still fall back on the idea that the nation state is the primary container of economic activity, and that economic competition is primarily between nations. Roger King points out that governments [have] become subject to increased pressure from industry and commerce to provide incentives for universities to generate more market receptive innovations . . . as a means of enhancing national competitiveness (p. 54). The economic arguments in these statements are clearly not simply descriptive accounts but highly motivated political-economic tactics. Rather than interrogating the economic claims embedded in such assertions, King and his fellow authors merely accept them and treat them as transparent truths. For them, globalization is nothing more than a heightened form of international competition, instead of a process of profound social and spatial restructuring in which economic benets do not accrue to unitary national societies, but to increasingly polarized populations. The impetus behind this book seems to be to make higher education into just another sector of the economy. Of course, universities have long served the interests of capital and other national projects, but never uncontested. The view here, in contrast, is of a university wholly given over not just to the market, but also to the agendas of large corporations (national or global players; p. 56). King looks forward to a day when universities may become further differentiated by the blue chip or otherwise of their industrial or commercial collaborators (p. 56). The authors revel in the possibility that university leaders will develop market strategies to capitalize on the WTOs General Agreement on T rade and Services (GATS), which would make education tradable activity that falls within the scope for greater liberalization and regulation (p. 74). What the authors try to pass off as analysis really amounts to

Rich Heyman University of Minnesota, Morris

Agnew, J. and Corbridge, S. 1995: Mastering space. New York: Routledge.

Book reviews Kloosterman, R. and Rath, J., editors 2003: Immigrant entrepreneurs: venturing abroad in the age of globalization. Oxford: Berg. xix 331 pp. 17.99 paper. ISBN: 1 85973 639 4. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070198 Most industrialized receiving countries have experienced a rise of immigrant and ethnic entrepreneurship in recent decades. Immigrant entrepreneurs addresses this phenomenon in the context of 11 countries in North America, Europe and South Africa. The book aims to provide a sound base (p. 14) for future international and interdisciplinary research on immigrant entrepreneurship. In order to achieve this goal, an international and interdisciplinary group of migration researchers, including eight geographers and six sociologists, as well as an anthropologist, economist and two interdisciplinary migration scholars, present an overview their countries experiences with immigration and immigrant entrepreneurship. The books purpose is not to present original research but rather to summarize existing literature and policies related to immigration and entrepreneurship and to put this material in a new and wider perspective. The book is organized into 12 chapters, preceded by a preface. In the introductory chapter, the editors Robert Kloosterman and Jan Rath lead the reader to the topic of immigrant entrepreneurship, discuss the status of academic debate on this topic, present a brief overview of the book and outline its contribution to scholarship. The following chapters take a closer look at ethnic entrepreneurship in 11 different countries. In the second chapter, Pyong Gap Min and Mehdi Bozorgmehr write about immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States. The placement of the case of the United States as the first substantive chapter signifies that researchers in the United States have historically driven the agenda on ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurship and dened many of the concepts and theories subsequently applied by

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researchers in other countries. The third chapter by Daniel Hiebert and the fourth chapter by Jock Collins examine the experiences of two other traditional immigrant countries, Canada and Australia. With the fth chapter, Sally Peberdy and Christian M. Rogerson shift the focus to South Africa and its experiences with migrant entrepreneurs from other sub-Saharan African countries. The remaining seven chapters feature European countries. Giles A. Barrett, Trever P . Jones and David McEvoy review ethnic entrepreneurialism in the United Kingdom, Jan Rath and Robert Kloosterman discuss immigrant entrepreneurship in The Netherlands, Marco Magatti and Fabio Quassoli present the case of Italy, Emmanuel Ma Mung and Thomas Lacroix examine France, and Ching Lin Pang writes about Belgium. In the nal two chapters, Regina Haberfellner examines Austria and Czarina Wilpert focuses on Germany. All of these chapters follow a similar pattern. They provide contextualized overviews of historical immigration trends, immigrant entrepreneurship, academic research on this topic and policies towards immigration and immigrant entrepreneurship. The aim of this approach is not only to illustrate the specic trends and patterns of ethnic entrepreneurship in each country, but also to show how these trends and patterns relate to particular political traditions, bureaucratic conditions, economic tendencies, national ideologies and social practices in the different countries. The book succeeds in providing a valuable comparison of national patterns of immigrant entrepreneurship and the circumstances that have created these patterns. In addition, the individual chapters review the academic literature on this topic in each country, illustrating how research agendas have been developed in different institutional environments and followed diverse intellectual traditions. According to the editors, the book was conceived as a successor to Roger Waldinger et al.s (1990) Ethnic entrepreneurs: immigrant business in industrial societies, which set a

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Book reviews and relates the occurrence and variability of ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurship in different countries global economic processes and labour practices. The editors addressed some of these issues in their introduction. (Unfortunately, I had difficulties referring back to the introduction because a manufacturing flaw resulted in the introductory pages falling out of their binding by the time I finished reading the final chapter.) In the end, I was left wanting to hear more about the implications of the individual chapters on future agendas for academics, activists and policy-makers. The need for such a concluding chapter, in my view, demonstrates the significance of the topic in general and the importance of the information presented in the individual contributions in particular. Immigrant entrepreneurs touches on other important issues in the individual chapters. For example, several chapters explicitly address gender differences in respect to immigrant self-employment. The editors note correctly that a gendered perspective of entrepreneurship continues to be an understudied area of research. A diverse audience could benefit from reading this book. The list includes researchers and students across the social sciences who are interested in immigration and entrepreneurship. It may also be of interest to policy-makers and activists who want to learn more about the connection between immigration and economic development. In my view, the value of the book lies not only its discussion of immigrant entrepreneurship but also in its presentation of general immigration trends, immigrant policies and ideological approaches towards immigration in the 11 countries. The potential readership therefore extends far beyond a relatively small group of academics and students who are researching immigrant entrepreneurship. For these researchers, however, Immigrant entreprenuers can indeed provide a sound base, as the editors intend, upon which to build future research agendas. This is an important book

research agenda for the 1990s based on an interactive model that combined sociocultural and politico-economic inuences on ethnic entrepreneurship. In Immigrant entrepreneurs Kloosterman and Rath now showcase their own mixed embeddedness approach. This approach seeks to offer a more sophisticated analysis of the interaction of structural processes (perhaps illustrated by the image of a headless businessperson on the cover) and agency by taking into account the characteristics of the supply of immigrant entrepreneurs, the shape of the opportunity structure, and the institutions mediating between aspiring entrepreneurs and concrete openings to start a business (p. 9). Although the editors claim in the introduction that the concept of mixed embeddedness has only guided the chapters of this book in a very broad manner (p. 9), the individual contributions illustrate rather effectively how national institutional frameworks, historical migration patterns, economic processes and state policies have shaped the nature of ethnic entrepreneurialism in each country. Individual chapters present examples of how national context shapes immigrant selfemployment. In Italy, the cultural valorization of self-employment has led to a relative saturation of the market and subjected entrepreneurial activities to strict social and institutional rules (p. 164) that disadvantage many immigrants. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, a relatively deregulated economy has opened larger economic opportunities in the self-employment sector. In Austria, entrepreneurship has a low prestige value, but the self-employment sector is nevertheless associated with signicant bureaucratic entry barriers for non-citizens. Of course, these few and grossly simplied examples cannot do full justice to the richness and complexity of the different stories of immigrant entrepreneurship told in each of the 11 chapters. What I would have liked to have seen is a concluding chapter that puts the individual chapters into an international perspective

Book reviews that has the potential to become a milestone on international research in immigration and entrepreneurship.

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Harald Bauder University of Guelph

Waldinger, R., Aldrich, H., Ward, R. and associates 1990: Ethnic entrepreneurs: immigrant business in industrial societies. London: Newbury Park.

Miles, M. and Hall, T with Borden, I., ., editors 2004: The city cultures reader (second edition). London: Routledge. xiv 508 pp. 100 cloth, 29.99 paper. ISBN: 0 415 30244 7 cloth, 0 415 30245 5 paper. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070200 I have a confession to make right from the start: I nd readers fascinating objects, at once strange and paradoxical. I approach them with some basic questions always at the forefront of my mind: who are the readers readers both actual and imagined? How are readers guided to read the reader by its editors? And how do readers really read it? Assembling a reader is a tricky business a point I shall return to later and I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who even tries it. But I am also a bit cynical about them as publications, in terms of the impact they have on the practices of reading. Like compilation CDs or list TV shows, they offer fragments of an idea, and then quickly move to the next. They are unsatisfying, unless they are treated more lie samplers: ways to try before you buy, with the expectation that the ideas tasted here could be chased up that reading, say, four and a half pages of Adorno should prompt us to go for the whole book if he has sufciently tickled our readerly fancy. That is one way that a reader is meant to work hence publishersusual willingness to grant permission for a reprint, in the hope of some spin-off sales. But, as who uses readers in the classroom knows, they have increasingly come to substitute for reading whole books: four and half pages of Adomo being as much as can be squeezed in to many students hectic lives.

Maybe we have to accept that, and at least recognize that four and a half pages of Adorno are better than none at all (though that too is a matter of opinion). These issues, these questions and more besides are more acutely into relief by the publication of this second edition of The city cultures reader. I immediately felt a nerdish compulsion to compare the rst and second editions helped, in fact, by the editors introduction to the new edition, which highlights some of the most significant changes since the rst volume appeared in 2000. Among the major transformations are a reduction in the number of essays (from 60 to 50) but with more space overall, allowing the editors to reprint lengthier extracts (an extra 170 pages in all). Moreover, only 12 chapters made it from the rst to second edition, and some of these are granted more room: Ann (Anne in the rst edition) Pendleton-Jullian, who ends both editions with a differently titled extract from her The road that is not a road and the open city at Ritoque. Chile, gets more than twice the page space in the letter edition, for example. This is, I feel a positive change: rst edition had a lot of short (and some very short) readings in it great to pop on a handout or overhead, but often less than satisfying in terms of getting complex arguments across. More pages, less extracts equals a better reader (and better reading). This new edition also opens with some fundamentals, in its rst two sections: What is a city? and What is culture? What, indeed? And what happens when these two terms with all their attendant baggage are brought together? It should come as no surprise that the editors neatly sidestep any definitional answers here, offering instead a sample of key texts from different disciplines (p. 3), to give a feeling for the diversity of ways of understanding cities, cultures, and city cultures. Holes could be picked, gripes sounded, about the selections in these sections, and how they serve to dene the remit of the book; but, as I shall return to below, readers always attract some kind of nitpicking

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Book reviews certainly that. Everyone reading and using this book will no doubt have their own quibbles, and their own favourites. So, rather than get my quibbles privileged in print, I have chosen to tell you some of the selections I most enjoyed in the new edition: Marjetica Potrcs artists pages, on the theme of nature in the city; Iain Borden, predictable but engaging on skateboarding; Ivan Illich (one of the survivors from the rst edition) on water, purication and dirt; Dean MacCannells timely intervention into the New Urbanism currently very in vogue with urban planners and entrepreneurial governors; Siegfried Kracauer on the non-place of the hotel lobby (also present in both editions). Overall, new The city cultures reader neatly balances big names and key themes with the more eclectic and obscure. Sometimes it seems blindingly obvious, other times full of surprises. In its juxtaposition of themes and perspectives, in fact, this new edition offers a suitable reection of city cultures themselves.

about selection which I feel is often a little harsh, given the actual business of assembling a reader out of all the possible readers that might be made around a topic. Jostling a collection of disparate perspectives into a semblance of rational order is a mighty act of heterogeneous engineering. After this hedging of denition, the reader proceeds through eight further sections, each (as with the rst two What is . . .? sections) flexed around a series of images (another innovation since the rst edition). Four of these are artists plates; the fth is by editor Miles himself, snapping redevelopments at the Barcelona waterftont. As the editors say, these plates are an attempt to represent city cultures beyond the written word a welcome addition to the reader, given the intense visualness of cities. I would like to see even more images in any future editions, should the editors be foolish (or enthusiastic) enough to agree for a third. (Other representations, such as lm and song, might also be included, on an accompanying DVD or web pages.) The inclusion of artists plates also sets the tone of the reader, in one sense, as quite arty there is a focus throughout on art as urban culture, especially in terms of discussions of public art, a reection perhaps of the key preoccupations of at least two of the editors. This brings me to the next point of comparison between the two editions: this new one includes an essay by each of the editors. Perhaps they were too modest last time around? So, what about the actual content? As someone who has co-edited a reader (and who is currently wrestling with a second edition), I know how much thought and work has been put into assembling this volume. Behind every reading is a sequence of events, discussions, correspondences as the editors make clear in their note about the absence of Walter Benjamin. I also know how annoying it is when reviewers point-up omissions, biases, niggles with the chosen extracts or their structuring into themes and sections. Readers can never suit all their readers, but they can be good enough and The city cultures reader is

David Bell Manchester Metropolitan University

Miles, S. and Miles, M. 2004: Consuming cities. Basingstoke: Palgrave. vi 209 pp. 52.50 cloth, 17.99 paper. ISBN: 0 333 97709 2 cloth, 0 333 97710 6 paper. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070201 The authors intend this book as a critical analysis of the impact of consumption on city life at the beginning of the twenty-rst century (p. 1). It partly meets this aim. It will certainly be appreciated by the future generations of students it intends as its main readership, not least for the way in which it rounds up and gives shape to the unruly body of literature dedicated to exploring the elective afnity between the city and consumption. There is, however, an apparent resistance in this book to taking certain ideas seriously; ideas which, one can only presume, the authors regard as somehow politically unsavoury. To my mind, this is unfortunate and, in the nal analysis, misguided. Thus, while the book manages to

Book reviews cover a useful range of literature and sustain its commitment to undercutting a variety of uncritical approaches, for my money, Miles and Miles never quite go far enough. The nine chapters the book comprises offer some interesting material, presented in a manner that occasionally comes across as rather collage-like but which generally manages to exhibit an overall consistency. The topics covered include an initial run-through of various theorists of consumption and the city (Chapter 1); a historical grounding of consumption (Chapter 2); an attempt to consider consumption as uniquely cultural in order to comprehend the nature of culture-driven urban regeneration (Chapter 3); urban tourism (Chapter 4); architectures of consumption (Chapter 5); Las Vegas as a place dedicated to consumers over and above residents (Chapter 6); Reinventing the consuming city (Chapter 7), which extends the insights of the previous chapter to consider how urban consumption has lost its specicity in the city; a useful chapter on alternative consumption (Chapter 8), which, in my estimation, is in advance of anything available elsewhere; and an attempt to round all this off with an overarching conclusion (Chapter 9). Most of these topics introduce case-study material relating to particular cities such as Plymouth, Manchester, Barcelona, and Celebration or, alternatively, particular spatial forms (eg, cruise ships in Chapter 7) or forms of spatial relation (eg, Dartmoor direct in Chapter 8). Although I have insider knowledge on who was responsible for which chapters, I think that the writing partnership works fairly well. One cannot see the join too obviously. Most of the material the book presents us with is fairly reliable, even if one might occasionally quibble with the odd definition or explanation. However, it seems to me that there are a number of issues with which the book deals inadequately. A case in point, which I would propose as symptomatic of the underlying weakness of the book, is provided in the first chapter, where we are told that Consumption is ideological(p. 4). While there

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is undoubtedly an ideology of consumption centring on the private individual, freedom of choice, etc I would contend that consumption does not, in fact, function as an ideology. We are now, at least in the most consumerist parts of the world, beyond ideology (and this is far from being the politically regressive or reactionary claim it might initially appear to represent). As Bauman notes, ideology as such relied on planting particular ideas in the heads of the people ideas that called for an articial design, careful selection of seed, and so on (Rojek, 2004: 300). In a consumer society, however, the trick is not to form ideas, but to spot them the moment they germinate and correctly assess their consumption-boosting potential. Beyond ideology, therefore, lies the realm Kundera (1984) aptly characterizes in terms of imagology, and which Baudrillard has analysed in terms of simulation molecular control after the fashion of the genetic code (Clarke, 2003). This is a realm with which, it seems, Miles and Miles are not fully prepared to acknowledge or engage; and which, therefore, goes sadly unexplored. Remaining squeamish about such issues, typically on the basis that they appear politically unpalatable, ultimately curtails our ability to appreciate the real difference consumption makes to the urban environment and to city life. This is, of course, a criticism that one might lay at the door of a good deal of existing work on consumption, and to this extent the book merely accurately reects a broader failing for which it cannot be solely held to account. In expressing such reservations, therefore, it is certainly not my intention to be unduly negative about Consuming cities. The book undoubtedly does a good, solid, and at times impressive job of introducing a range of relevant subject matter alongside useful illustrative case-study material that will inform students across the range of disciplines listed in the back-cover blurb: sociology, cultural studies, human geography, urban studies and community studies. Yet it is a pity that it falls short on allowing its readers to think through some of the more challenging if not contentious ideas about city

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Book reviews efforts to address the deprivations faced by those with low incomes (p. xii). The introduction, written by Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite, describes each of the eight case studies that comprise the book, and outlines several interrelated dynamics which contribute to urban poverty. The authors argue here and in the conclusion that the case study organizations reduce some of the deprivations associated with poverty, but more importantly they also give urban poor a voice in their own destiny. Although not a dominant theme, the introduction hints that giving urban poor residents more power over the programmes that seek to help them is an essential element in fostering a greater sense of citizenship and autonomy. This theme is picked up in varying degrees in the case study chapters, although all remain rather focused on policy with a curious absence of the voices of the poor themselves. The introduction is followed by four case studies of government programmes to address various aspects of urban poverty, four additional case studies of community-based urban anti-poverty programmes, and a concluding section. The division between the two case study sections is somewhat articial, because, in almost every case, whether a government programme or a civil-society based one, relationships and cooperation between government and community groups were the primary mechanism through which the policies were enacted. Two concluding chapters by Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite complete the book, in which they discuss the successes of the case studies in addressing some of the problems of urban poverty, and make recommendations for the role of community groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government in urban anti-poverty programmes. The case studies focusing on government initiatives highlight the abilities of national governments to create change in local governments, including by encouraging greater trust and interaction between government and community groups. This leverage comes primarily

living in a consumer society: that consumerism takes us beyond ideology, for example; or that the consumer society really is utopia albeit what Baudrillard (1998) terms a minimal utopia. One might also include here the whole question of alternativeconsumption in the face of the fundamentally tautological nature of the consumer society though, in this particular case, the book comes much closer to addressing the type of reservations I have registered. To sum up, then, the idea that consumption divides as much as it provides the contention that lies at the very heart of this book (p. 2) is certainly a necessary but not necessarily a sufcient basis for understanding the urban implications of consumerism.

David B. Clarke University of Leeds

Baudrillard, J. 1998: The end of the millennium or the countdown. Theory, Culture and Society 15, 19. Clarke, D.B. 2003: The consumer society and the postmodern city. London: Routledge. Kundera, M. 1984: Immortality. London: Faber and Faber. Rojek, C. 2004: The consumerist syndrome in contemporary society: an interview with Zygmunt Bauman. Journal of Consumer Culture 4, 291312.

Mitlin, D. and Satterthwaite, D., editors 2004: Empowering squatter citizen: local government, civil society and urban poverty reduction. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan. xxi 313 pp. 60 cloth, 19.95 paper. ISBN: 1 84407 101 4. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070202 Continuing a series on urban poverty from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), Empowering squatter citizen contains eight case studies of community development efforts among urban poor around the world. The title of the book, which seems grammatically awkward at rst, intentionally evokes another publication (the book Squatter citizen, of which David Satterthwaite was a co-editor; (Hardoy and Satterthwaite, 1989). The goal of the book is to examine

Book reviews from innovative programmes with nancing weight behind them. This section emphasizes the importance of nancing; the difculties of helping the poorest of the poor; and the politics of shifting government policies, which alter the structures and mandates of even successful programmes. The four chapters in this section span a broad reach geographically: Thailands Urban Community Development Ofce (UCDO) later the Community Organization Development Institute (CODI) by Somsook Boonyabancha; the Community Mortgage Programme (CMP) in the Philippines, written by Emma Porio with Christine S. Cristol, Nota F Magno, David Cid, and Evelyn N. Paul; . Priscilla Connollys examination of the Mexican National Popular Housing Fund, or FONHAPO; and Alfredo Steins investigation of the Local Development Programme, or PRODEL, in cities in Nicaragua. The second set of case studies examine anti-poverty urban programmes from the perspective of the bottom up, but even these programmes involve cooperation or engagement of some kind with various levels of government. Thus, although they are not national in scope like the rst set of cases, these case studies do not seem as different from the rst set as the overall structure of the book suggests. As in the previous section, the case studies represent a broad geographical and topical array: Salim Alimuddin, Arif Hasan, and Asiya Sadiq examine the Anjuman Samaji Behbood (ASB) in Pakistan; Debora Cavalcanti, Olinda Marques and Teresa Hilda Costa investigate the Municipal Programme for the Reform and Extension of Homes in Brazil; Ted Baumann, Joel Bolnick and Diana Mitlin describe the South African Homeless Peoples Federation, and Sheela Patel and Diana Mitlin investigate an Alliance of organizations in India. While the rst set of case studies demonstrated the ability of urban poor to pool resources and pay off loans when given access to nancial resources, the second set emphasizes the importance of community direction and autonomy. In each case, urban

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poor are able to improve local infrastructure or housing when they network together, both within residential communities, with government and NGOs, and with other urban communities locally and internationally. Taken together, all of the case studies provide encouraging evidence of community-government-NGO cooperation and creativity. In particular, they demonstrate the capabilities of local residents to improve their circumstances when supported with resources and contacts to cut through bureaucracies. However, the constraints of interpersonal conflict, financial limitations, and shifting political frameworks pose challenges for maintaining or replicating the successes of these programmes. Nonetheless, as Mitlin and Satterthwaite point out in their conclusions, when given the opportunity to network together and create their own solutions with the support of government, the urban poor have great ability to be innovative in addressing the deprivations of poverty. While providing a great resource in its diversity of case studies, Empowering squatter citizen frustrates through an odd detachment. In their effort to be prescriptive and analytical in their descriptions of specic programmes, many of the chapters suffer from an absence of concreteness, or sense of the voices and lives of the urban poor themselves. (One exception is Chapter six on the ASB in Pakistan, which contains a delightfully detailed analysis of interpersonal relations and tensions that nearly derailed the success of the programme.) There is clearly a tension in the book between policy details that connect all of the chapters, and the particular concrete realities of daily life in each neighbourhood and community reached by the programmes. The editorial solution is a series of boxes that provide empirical illustrations of specic programmes in each chapter. Unfortunately, this is an unsatisfying solution. It distracts the reader and creates a disjuncture between policy and people that the authors would likely renounce in practice. In some cases (including Chapter six), the illustrations in boxes are

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Book reviews What does the name Jean Gottmannmean to you? Among my young colleagues this question produced blank faces. For those of my generation, the words Megalopolis and Oxford emerged, and from the emeriti a wider and more nuanced range of reactions was forthcoming. For me, Gottmannevokes a brief telephone conversation many years back asking me to examine an Oxford D.Phil. candidate, the preview of the Megalopolis work that that I read as an undergraduate in the pages of Economic Geography and, of course, the Megalopolis monograph (Gottmann, 1957; 1961). I must confess that I had forgotten that I owned a copy but found it on a very high shelf at home, well out of reach; a stepladder was needed to retrieve it. Yet, if the career of Jean Gottmann (191594) and his numerous writings are either ignored or forgotten by many readers of this review, his memory is alive and well among select groups of geographers and planners in France, Greece, Italy, Japan, the USA and doubtless elsewhere (Clout and Hall, 2003). Early in 2005, three double issues of the elusive journal Ekistics eventually appeared. They contained a suite of essays bearing the collective title In the steps of Jean Gottmann and were organized around three major themes: reflections on Gottmanns thought; from megalopolis to global cities; and a new geopolitics of the world. No fewer than 408 pages were devoted to memories of Gottmann, to appreciations and critiques of his work, and to research that owed its development to his ideas. John Agnew, Paul Claval, and Ron Johnston are perhaps the best-known contributors, standing alongside Franois Gay and Michel Phlipponneau who knew Gottmann from the early 1950s, and a host of scholars from many parts of the world who drew inspiration from him. Two essayists provide essential background information: emeritus professor Robert Harper (University of Maryland) and young Luca Muscar (Molize, Italy). Muscars article The long road to Megalopolis must surely stand as the denitive succinct study on the life and work

actually central to understanding the specics of a given chapter, so their separateness from the main text is even more perplexing. This book is a good resource for ideas about addressing urban poverty while also warning about the pitfalls inherent in community development work. It demonstrates the commonalities of urban anti-poverty initiatives globally, which regardless of location tend to focus on micro-enterprise credit, land tenure and homeownership, infrastructure such as water and sewer, and savings cooperatives. A central theme is the power of giving leadership to urban poor especially women who can best identify their own needs and creative ways to meet them. Further, empowering residents fosters positive interactions with government agencies and NGOs, which in turn can help urban poor network nationally and internationally to share resources and ideas (this is a major theme of the last of the eight case studies, on alliances among several antipoverty groups in India). The book will be most useful for policymakers and educators teaching in the area of community or international development. Most of the chapters can stand alone as individual case studies, although the overall relevance and conclusions of each are strengthened when paired with the books concluding chapters. Finally, geographers will appreciate the diverse international scope, although they might be frustrated by the lack of attention to dynamics of policy signicance and implementation at multiple scales, which are hinted at in the nal concluding chapter but not explicitly analysed.

Deborah G. Martin Clark University

Hardoy, J.E. and Satterthwaite, D. 1989: Squatter citizen: life in the urban third world. London: Earthscan.

Muscar, L. 2005: La Strada di Gottmann. Tra universalismi della storia e particolarismi della geograa. Rome: Nexta. 248 pp. Price unavailable. ISBN: 88 901792 0 1. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070203

Book reviews of Gottmann, tracing his escape from Russia soon after the 1917 Revolution, his studies in the Sorbonne, his second escape (as a Jewish intellectual) from France to the USA, his teaching and research in America, his longstanding transatlantic transhumance (involving teaching and research positions held sometimes simultaneously in France and the USA), the completion of Megalopolis, and ultimately Gottmanns tenure of the Halford Mackinder Chair of Geography at Oxford (Muscar, 2003a). Muscars essay makes excellent use of Gottmanns papers and correspondence, held as the Fonds Gottmann in the Bibliothque Nationale de France in Paris. Despite the brevity of his article, Muscar manages to shed important light on Gottmanns departure from Johns Hopkins University, whose President Isaiah Bowman decided that Gottmann (and Karl Peltzer and Andrew Clark) should be let go at the same time as he pronounced on the terminal fate of Geography at Harvard. Muscar also cites Gottmanns descriptions of the leading geographers at the Sorbonne in the late 1940s: Andr Cholley, Georges Chabot, Aim Perpillou and Charles Robequain were all seen as mediocrities, while Jean Dresch and Pierre George were Marxists (Dresch being acknowledged as a reasonable scientist, but George simply as a bluffer (Muscar, 2003a: 34). Gottmanns doctorat dtat would not be awarded by the prestigious Sorbonne but rather by the suburban university of Nanterre, and would not come come until 1969 by which time new legislation had been passed that allowed published works (travaux) to be assessed, rather than a major thesis plus a small secondary thesis. Gottmanns pile of publications apparently exceeded one metre; to be doubly safe, his board of examiners ( jury) comprised no fewer than nine professors. At the end of March 2005 a two-day conference devoted to Jean Gottmann was held in Paris under the auspices of the Sorbonne, the International Geographical Union, the Socit

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de Gographie, and the Bibliothque Nationale de France. International luminaries and old friends delivered papers on Gottmanns ideas and work, most being laudatory although a few raised healthy academic criticism. The heart of the proceedings was Luca Muscars presentation of his monograph, La Strada di Gottmann. This expands on his article in Ekistics and delves deeply into the Fonds Gottmann (Muscar, 2003a). The result may be read almost like a novel, tracing the activities of a brilliant Jewish scholar whose unstoppable energy produced a formidable academic output (some 400 publications not just in English and French but in several other languages), whose advisory skills were sought by national and international bodies (including the US and French governments and the United Nations), but whose basewas far from secure until the nal stage of his career. For decades, Gottmann lived a migratory life, not just among research institutes and government ofces in the cities of the North American megalopolis, but also between the USA and France, and among a variety of American universities (where he was visiting professor) and the Institut dEtudes Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris, where he taught for a semester each year from 1948 to 1960, and subsequently at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. One wonders where he kept his private library of books and where he settled down to write. Without either a PhD or a doctorat dtat until 1969, Gottmann lacked a permanent position for the central part of his career. One wonders if he invested in property, or whether he and his wife, Bernice, lived in a succession of rented apartments. Luca Muscar captures Gottmanns frustrations with the Marxists and the mediocrities in French academic geography in the late 1940s and 1950s, his sense that he would never hold a tenured post in a French university, and that his own formulations of geopolitics, resource use (and misuse), iconography, globalization (avant la lettre), the quaternary sector, and spatial interaction were stied by the dead hand of the geological map, of geomorphology,

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Book reviews women as much as it is of innovations, trends, and fashions of what one of my senior colleagues dismisses as the -isms and the -wasms. Without biographical studies like La Strada di Gottmann, I contend that our understanding of human geography will remain the poorer.

rural studies and regional description in geography departments in France during the 1950s and much of the 1960s. If ever there were a prophet without honour in his own country, then Gottmann was such a prophet. But which was his own country? As a Russian citizen (eventually a naturalized Frenchman) he was an outsider in the USA and again at Oxford. As a social scientist (lacking a doctorate for decades) he was an outsider among academic geographers, but the less-constrained planning profession accepted him more readily. In a masterly way, Muscar juxtaposes two fascinating quotations (p. 161). Gottmann declares: There are times when I no longer know where I am, in New York or in Paris. I feel perfectly at home on both sides of the Atlantic (letter of 16 April 1947). Conversely, NSB (unidentied) states: It seems to me that oscillating between Western Europe and America is precisely his difculty (document of 8 April 1948). Even at Oxford, where holding the Mackinder Chair appealed to his devotion to geopolitics, Gottmann was an outsider who initially understood little or nothing of the erce independence of the colleges, of the distinctiveness of their tutorial systems, or of the limitations surrounding the post of head of department that he held. Muscar says very little of this nal phase of Gottmanns career apart from charting the continuing ow of letters, chapters and articles that were dictated or handwritten prior to be typed up by secretaries. His remarkable productivity is listed both in Ekistics and on a bibliographical website (Muscar, 1998; 2003b). It may be that the years between 1968 and 1994 can only be elucidated by the few disciples and surviving colleagues who were close to him at Oxford. The impressive biographical monograph by Luca Muscar not only illuminates our knowledge of a major scholar whose life was a curious mosaic of brilliance, achievement, frustration and rejection, but also reminds us that the evolution of our discipline as of all others is the story of specific men and

Hugh Clout University College London

Clout, H. and Hall, P .G. 2003: Jean Gottmann, 19151994. Proceedings of the British Academy 120, 20115. Gottmann, J. 1957: Megalopolis, or the urbanization of the Northeastern Seaboard. Economic Geography 33, 189200. 1961: Megalopolis: the urbanized northeastern seaboard of the United States. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund. Muscar, L. 1998: Bibliografia completa di Jean Gottmann. Cybergeo 64 (available at www.cybergeo. presse.fr/ehgo/muscara/gottbibl.htm). 2003a: The long road to Megalopolis. Ekistics 70, 2335. 2003b. The complete bibliography of Jean Gottmann. Ekistics 70, 11119.

Nellis, M.D., Monk, J. and Cutter, S.L., editors 2004: Presidential musings from the Meridian: reections on the nature of geography by Past Presidents of the Association of American Geographers. Morgantown, VA: West Virginia University Press. Number of pages unavailable. US$35 paper. ISBN: 0 937058 89 0. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070204 The Association of American Geographers Newsletter, which appears 11 times each year, is not only a valuable source of immediate information but also a useful resource for disciplinary historians. Since 1983, the Associations President has contributed a column in every issue, and Presidents occasionally wrote such a piece during the previous 16 years. Almost all of those columns related to contemporary issues and, as such, provide a perspective on what was concerning geographers at the time. This was recognized by Nellis, Monk and Cutter themselves recent AAG Presidents who

Book reviews decided to edit a compilation of selected columns. This was done by inviting past Presidents to nominate 35 of their favourite columns (Im not sure how they contacted those now deceased!), from which 253 items penned by 32 different individuals were nally selected. Those contributions are grouped thematically into chapters: Beginnings, 19671983; Geographic education; Career preparation and alternative professional paths; Creating and maintaining strong and healthy departments; Diversity issues; The professional society; International relations and issues; Disciplinary directions; Geography and public policy; National visibility and the public role of geography; Ethical issues; Humorous musings; and Concluding thoughts. There are also brief biographical sketches of the 32 contributors. As expected from what are, in effect, pieces of journalism written to tight deadlines, most discuss contemporary issues which are on either the then-Presidents or the Associations agenda and/or are being debated at the time. Not surprisingly, some themes recur (I occasionally had the feeling of dj vu all over again!). This raises some problems. Occasionally, the reader especially one who was not around at the time and so does not recall what the debate was about needs contextual material about specic references (such as the ERA boycott mentioned on p. 23; media stories about American geographical ignorance referred to on p. 27; and the Bellagio Declaration on World Hunger convened by Bob Kates and Akin Mabogunje on p. 139). Editorial footnotes would have been very useful in such places. They could have told readers more about the Williamsburg Summit that led to geography being included as one of the ve core subjects incorporated in the National Educational, for example (and was the AAG involved?). Further, the reader-historian is often left wondering what did happen if anything. There are several references to programmes and other activities that have been

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funded but to what extent (see, for example, discussions of international relations on p. 140, of resource sharing on p.143, and the several mentions of the successful work of Geographical Alliances promoting geographical education in schools: what happened?) The Presidents columns are only part of the debates, of course. Many of them call for members to respond and in later columns they thank those who did but only rarely (as on p. 212) do we nd out in any detail what the responses were. The AAG Newsletter is very much a top-down communication medium: it does not carry letters or other comments from individual members, so we know what the President was thinking but rarely can assess whether this was in tune with the views of the members (or a signicant number of them). This is perhaps unfortunate. Few of the columns express strong, personal views which are likely to be highly controversial. One that did and repays reading now is Terry Jordans August 1987 piece on Priorities, which argued that the AAG was neglecting its academic core by not putting more of its resources into its publishing activities, plus a later (March 1998) piece arguing that geographers publish too few high-quality books, especially research monographs. Apparently some of the replies he received did not impress, leading him to categorize some AAG members as anti-intellectual(June 1998). In his view, if the Associations work continued to be as he saw it unbalanced, favouring the applied and pedagogical profession, it would surely mean the death of the academic discipline of geography. For many of the other Presidents, for much of the time, ensuring that disciplinary death did not occur involved both pressing the case for geographical education at all levels (including the continuing threats to a not insubstantial number of university departments) and winning geography a higher prole generally, not least through contributions to public policy and positive media coverage. These are continuing themes throughout the book some of them trenchantly expressed, as in Ron Ablers January 2000 column

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Book reviews
forward in articulating geographys value and common bonds as well as societys need for a geographic perspective. (p. 3)

(standing in for Reg Golledge) on Five steps to oblivion and Tom Wilbanks December 1992 letter to Bill Clinton on his election as President of the USA (was it sent? did he get a reply?) plus his earlier analysis of what society wants of geography (November 1992). Geographys parlous state throughout the US educational system is necessarily a major focus of the AAGs ofcers terms. While continually being concerned about the state of geography nationally, AAG Presidents are also concerned about the condition of their own Association and the twin activities which attract most attention from most members publications and meetings. On the latter, several revisit the issue over the open meeting introduced after Les Currys intervention at the 1973 AGM. Should there be any vetting of papers, or should there instead be an open invitation to contribute within specified parameters regarding the number of times any one individual can appear on the programme? The latter is clearly popular, as shown by the continued growth in attendance and programme size over recent years and the increased role of the AAG annual meeting as a major international gathering perhaps the biggest (Anglophone) international gathering of geographers now occurring. (See the data about the 2001 meetings cited by Jan Monk in August of that year on p. 130.) The AAG is clearly a vibrant organization, whose meetings are much appreciated and whose journals (especially the Annals) have considerable impact even if the nature of both services is continually being debated. It does much more for geography, however, through its elected ofcers and substantial headquarters staff. (Is it the largest such academic geographical organization in the world?) Is it successful in those wider tasks? The editors are clearly positive and optimistic. Reflecting on some of the early columns, they conclude that:
they point to a time when geography was under attack, but through sound leadership and action, was able to weather these difculties, strengthen the disciplines position, and move

In a similar vein, the Associations current Executive Director, Doug Richardson, claims in his Preface that:
this book . . . documents a trajectory of dramatic change and real progress in many broad areas. Geographys key support institutions (the AAG foremost among them) have been strengthened over the years, its relevance within the university and in society are now the envy of many, and increasingly strong linkages between researchers in academic geography and those in other disciplines and other sectors (public and private) are now ourishing. (p. xvii)

They may be viewing the situation through rose-coloured glasses to some extent; reading some of the later columns, it is clear that many of the problems are still there. But this is not to deny the many successes and the possible failures that may have been prevented by the AAGs actions. There is much to be proud of, not least in the growing diversity of the geographical profession in the USA (see, for example, Risa Palms October 1984 and February 1985 columns reprinted here on gender issues, but also Jan Monks less positive April 2002 report on minority representation): more generally, read Alec Murphy on What if there were no AAG? (April 2004). Doug Richardsons claim that these reprinted Presidential columns collectively represent a rst draft of our history as a discipline (p. viii) may stray somewhat towards hyperbole. Nevertheless, they are important documents for such a history, particularly one which stresses the disciplines institutional trajectory alongside its intellectual. There is a wide if not widespread feeling that we are not sufciently concerned about preserving the necessary raw materials on which a fully informed history will be based. Bringing these Presidential columns together reminds us of that. (And also stirs memories of some of the events discussed: my rst AAG meeting was Ann Arbor in 1969, following the decision to move it from

Book reviews Chicago after the events at the Democratic Party National Convention there the previous year: it including Bill Bunges renowned eldtrip to Fitzgerald was a baptism of re for me!) Meanwhile, rereading them enhances an understanding of the events of the last 40 years as seen through the eyes and pens of some of its elected leaders, and reinforces an appreciation of the important role that the AAG has played in the preservation and enhancement of the status of geography not just in its own difcult national context but also internationally.

701

Ron Johnston University of Bristol

Sandler, T 2004: Global collective action. . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xii 299 pp. 40 cloth, 17.99 paper. ISBN: 0 52183 477 5 cloth, 0 52154 254 5 paper. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070205 Already the dominant approach in American political science, rational choice theory is making signicant inroads into US scholarship on international relations. The universal theoretical pretensions of this perspective, buttressed by a formal methodology (modelling interactions between agents as games of strategic exchanges in pursuit of maximal utility), offer support to those who see economic reasoning as valid in explaining political behaviour at all geographical scales. Todd Sandler, Professor of International Relations and Economics at the University of Southern California, is at the forefront of efforts to extend rational choice theory to global challenges and institutions. In Global collective action the focus is on interdependent decision-making between nation states notably instances where coordination is needed to address cross-border health, development, security and environmental threats to well-being. What are the conditions for effective collection action at the transnational level? How can changes

to institutional structures foster these conditions? Chapters 24 set out the game theoretical framework applied to selected global issues in the rest of the book. For Sandler, the study of collective action is concerned with investigating the factors that motivate agents to coordinate their activities to improve their collective well-being (p. 19). Global collective action failures arise when what is rational for a national party is not sufcient to secure what is socially optimal for transnational or planetary communities. A number of standard game forms prisoners dilemma, assurance, coordination and chicken are argued to capture the essential choices and payoffs facing players caught up in collective action difculties. The appropriate game form for analysing a particular collective action failure is determined by the nature of the participants, the institutional rules at play and, above all, the public good characteristics of the problem. With regard to the latter, increasing levels of exclusion and/or rivalry have typically been associated with falling severity in the collective action failure. So, for example, the pure public good of global warming reduction, with no means of excluding unrestrained polluting states from the benets caused by reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by other states, is deemed more difficult to supply than an impure public good like intelligence gathered on organized crime, where non-contributors can be excluded even though benets remain non-rival. Sandler maintains that it is essential to incorporate a further property of publicness aggregation technology in order more precisely to grasp the incentive structures underlying collective action failures (pp. 6068). The technology of aggregation involves the manner in which individual contributions determine the total quantity of a public good available for consumption. There are at least ve types of aggregation technology summation, weakest link, threshold, best shot and weighted sum inuencing the payoff calculus for individual actors. It is the tendency to

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Book reviews Informed by the analysis in the preceding chapters, in Chapter 12 Sandler pulls together what he takes to be favourable conditions for effective collective action in response to transnational and global risks. These include limiting initial cooperation to the most responsive states, highlighting localized or countryspecific benefits, resolving scientific uncertainty, promoting leadership by key states, prioritizing actions with ubiquitous and immediate payoffs, and shaping appropriate aggregation technology (pp. 25860). A major recommendation for institutional design arising from the books case studies is to apply the principle of subsidiarity to decision-making structures, so that the coordinating jurisdiction coincides with the spillover range of a public good or bad. Sandler identies movement in this direction, as some of the activities of global multilateral organizations are assigned to regional institutions and networks. Yet numerous obstacles remain to the adoption of smart regulatory structures, such as bureaucratic rigidities and capacity shortfalls. His summary conclusion is that policies that save on transaction costs by utilizing minimalist institutions that harness the participants self-interested motives work best (pp. 26768). Global collective action is an impressive application of rational choice theory, systematically engaging with a diverse range of cross-border problems. Sandler writes in a clear, concise style and the accessibility of the text is enhanced by his decision to exclude mathematical workings from all but the most basic set-ups of strategic games. This boosts the pedagogic value of the book, and it will surely nd its way onto the reading lists of university courses concerned with global governance. I highly recommend it to colleagues in human geography with relevant teaching and research interests. However, I can also anticipate some of the reservations likely to be levelled at the book by those geographers, including myself, sceptical of the core assumptions of rational choice theory in particular, its truncated notion of rationality (collapsing social action into

assume summation (where public good levels are simply the sum of individual contributions; that is, everyones marginal inuence is the same), Sandler argues, that has generated overly pessimistic prognoses for resolving collective action failures. He suggests, instead, that some aggregation technologies may offer more hopeful inducements for collective action by, for example, enhancing the importance of the smallest contribution (weakest link: eg, limiting the diffusion of a disease) or differentiating additional contributions according to their marginal impact (weighted sum: eg, regional reductions in sulphur emissions). It is the wide-ranging application of game theory to specic global problems that marks out the welcome originality of Sandlers book. The collective action challenges pinpointed all issue from the growth of cross-border ows in a geopolitical environment in which states resist ceding sovereign powers to international institutions. In the areas of global health (Chapter 5) and foreign aid (Chapter 6), Sandler cautions against generalizations on effective global coordination, although it is clear in both cases how much the policy actions of developed countries are implicated in the underprovision of public goods for developing world communities. Chapters 79, preoccupied with the threats from rogue states, transnational terrorism and civil wars, offer astute observations on the inability of the international community to respond effectively to new security threats. Chapters 10 and 11, interrogating atmospheric pollution and the exploitation of outer space, relay some of the familiar collective action failures impeding international efforts to protect the environment. A noteworthy, albeit provocative, observation here is that that use of the 1987 Montreal Protocol (on ozone layer protection) as a template for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (on climate change) has inhibited progress on global warming, because international policy-makers have failed to engage with the unique collective action structure constraining cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions (p. 232).

Book reviews purposive, utility maximizing behaviour) and its hidden normativity (presenting a value-laden economic model as an objective benchmark for evaluating welfare gains and losses). For example, my own work on environmental responsibility across borders certainly nds problematic the assumption that governments protect their citizens well-being (p. 77): the territorial fallacy that state structures necessarily represent the needs of threatened publics underlies numerous accountability decits in ecological problem-solving (Mason, 2005). It would have been instructive if Sandler had acknowledged the challenges issued to rational choice theory from other perspectives (especially as these impinge on global governance questions). Nevertheless, his sensitivity to context when proling collective action problems certainly invites a response from geographers. Even those of us diverging philosophically from Sandlers position can acknowledge his invaluable contribution to understanding why successful global cooperation is often so difcult.

703

Michael Mason London School of Economics

Mason, M. 2005: The new accountability: environmental responsibility across borders. London: Earthscan.

Smallman-Raynor, M. and Cliff, A. 2004: War epidemics: an historical geography of infectious diseases in military conict and civil strife, 18502000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xxxvi 805 pp. 100 cloth. ISBN: 0 19823 364 7. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070206 War epidemics is a reference work of meticulous detail. Disease, and in particular the epidemics associated with war, usually kill far more people than die from the actual ghting. In many cases epidemics are associated with more deaths and incapacitation even for the largely male ghting forces directly involved in a war than is the ghting itself. For a sample of 24 major wars from 1792 the authors show

epidemic disease to be responsible for more deaths than battle in the majority of cases among ghting forces, in four cases causing seven or more times as many deaths (Table 1.13). The disease death toll among civilians is often huge and thus civilian casualties have always been a feature of war, not simply a product of modern collateral damage. In this book the authors concentrate as much on minor but locally signicant wars as on global catastrophe, in order to demonstrate a series of generalized claims they make. They show that right up to the present day disease related to war accounts for enormous numbers of deaths and is rising in importance as a global killer. To get just a taste of the evidence they have collated on dozens of diseases from a huge range of sources and over a great global span, take the quick tour through two millennia of disease and war. Measles or smallpox brought to Rome during the Roman Gothic wars killed as many as 5,000 people per day in that city shortly after AD 250. Records are sparse in the intervening centuries, but a millennium later severe scurvy resulted in the loss of up to a fth of the Fifth Crusader Army at Damietta in 1218. In 1485 sweating sickness during the Wars of the Roses left most students at Oxford dead. The Spanish Wars of Conquest in Mexico resulted in 215 million people dying of smallpox between 1518 and 1520 from the introduction of that disease to a people through war. The Thirty Years War resulted in over 7,000 people in Dresden dying of bubonic plague in 163233. In 1709, over four times as many died when the plague was brought to Danzig in the Second Northern War; and in 177172 almost twice as many died again from plague brought by the Russo-Turkish War to Moscow. Yellow fever resulted in the lost of 22,000 French troops in Haiti between 1801 and 1803. Cholera killed seven times as many during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; and roughly a fifth of a million people in the Philippines during its war with America in 19021904. Typhus fever resulted in up to three million deaths during the revolution and

704

Book reviews book differently although, in my case, I could not have written this book because I do not have had the tenacity or thoroughness to carry out a project as wide-ranging and detailed as this. Given how comprehensive an account of war epidemics this is, it is would be somewhat disingenuous to suggest any changes that could have been made. Nevertheless there is one thing which strikes me as odd about the book. This is its treatment of so many wars as case studies, in effect treating all wars as examples but some are clearly much more important than others. One in particular stands out as possibly accounting for more war-related deaths in this period than all other examples given in the book combined the inuenza outbreak of 191819 (leading to at least 20 million, perhaps 40 million, deaths worldwide). Figure 1 shows just how devastating this epidemic was, depicting mortality rates at just a single year of age for wealthy nations that collect such records. Globally, in the rich nations of the world, no single event other than this pandemic has any signicant effect on the general pattern of mortality decline during this period. Twice as many people died at young ages than normally die worldwide. The gure shows they even effected 10-year-olds. The numbers of people who never reached adulthood, or never had children of their own as a result of that pandemic, are staggering. There is, in effect, a missing cohort in the western world and beyond, whose children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are missing too. Many but not quite most of the 10-year-old girls who died worldwide in 1918 should not have expected to be dying until now. They would be 86 as I write. An event occurred within living memory which is the most shattering event demographically to have taken place in centuries and yet we have almost no collective memory of the pandemic. How does this book cover this disease? Answer: in three places. First, the inuenza pandemic is studied on pp. 396407 of the book as an example of how an epidemic sequence through US military

civil war in Russia between 1917 and 1922; but most devastation of all was wreaked in the last century by the inuenza pandemic of 191819 associated with the rst world war which resulted in 2040 million deaths worldwide. More recently, roughly 100,000 people died of visceral leishmaniasis (a malaria-like illness) during civil war in the Sudan between 1984 and 1994, and the number of wars taking place around the world has increased at an alarming rate since 1940 resulting in huge numbers of epidemic disease deaths in recent decades. The above list is just a tiny fraction of the counts given in the rst table of the book. There are a further 131 tables of data and many more gures, plates, maps and analysis of mass death and destruction throughout this tome. T aken as a whole this book is an audit of human-induced human suffering on a colossal scale. Although its authors have not attempted to cover all major conicts during the period stated in their title, they do cover most of them and extend their studies well before 1850 also. The book is consequently written in four parts beginning with a survey of war-disease associations from early times to 1850. Part two concerns temporal trends and examines these in the period since 1850. Part three is concerned with the regional pattern of war epidemics and studies grand themes of epidemiology and historical medical geography of diseases associated with war. The nal, quite short, part of the book considers a series of war-related issues of epidemiological signicance in the twenty-rst century. The book uses many archival sources but, as well as summarizing narrated histories, quantitative techniques are used innovatively and are clearly thought out to help understand these sources and dispel many myths in a way not usually associated with such historical works. The book is an extremely signicant contribution to research in the history of diseases and medical geography more widely, and is not simply a study of war epidemics. It deserves to be widely read and referred to, not least given the importance of its subject. It is the privilege of reviewers to suggest ways in which they would have written a

Book reviews

705

Figure 1 Mortality rate per thousand per year of 10-year-old girls in developed countries 18502000
Source: Data derived from all countries in the Human Mortality Database. University of California, Berkeley (USA), and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany). Available at www.mortality.org or www.humanmortality.de. Data downloaded September 2004 and results for 17 countries combined (including Sweden, England and Wales, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, France and Spain up to and beyond 19811919, and for later years Canada, Denmark, Bulgaria, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Japan, Russia and the USA).

camps can be studied where influenza accounted for a third of a million admissions among enlisted men in the United States between October 1917 and December 1918 (T able 7.9, incidently containing the only typo I could nd in the book the rst total of 73,515 makes no sense to me!). Second, inuenza is returned to again in pp. 57993 where the its dispersal around the world is briey covered before the authors concentrate on the effect of quarantine on Australia and to New Zealand and other Pacic islands, resulting in total in only roughly 85 thousand deaths (T able 11.9). Third, the pandemic as it affected England and Wales is discussed on pp. 66477 where 65,000 people died between June 1981 and April 1919 (T able 12.7). Greater detail is given on under a couple of thousand cases in Cambridge (which resulted in relatively few

deaths) and on the spread of encephalitis lethargicia through the districts of the city of Bristol that came in the aftermath of this inuenza pandemic. Although these three sections are interesting, there remain some 19.9 to 39.9 million deaths to be accounted for. Furthermore the authors only touch on the key questions of this largest of all war-related disease outbreaks did war lead to the spread and help create this apparently new form of disease, and/or possibly help its management? If the influenza outbreak was simply coincident with war then it could easily happen again, world war or no world war. If the disease became this deadly due to the privations that people were living under then, in rich countries at least, it is unlikely to occur again in the same way unless and until we have another

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Book reviews some point be far fewer of us for it to be with. Like the diseases associated with poverty, war and disease will be with us for as long as we choose to foster and maintain them. The sooner we learn that poverty and war threaten all our futures the better chance we all have of not having to learn these lessons the hard and often fatal way. This book is a major step in our learning of how to live. Danny Dorling University of Shefeld Smith, A.D. 2004: The antiquity of nations. Cambridge: Polity Press. vii 266 pp. 45 cloth, 12.99 paper. ISBN: 0 7456 2745 5 cloth, 0 7456 2746 3 paper. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070207 Three decades on, Professor A.D. Smith has had occasion to revisit several of the principal issues discussed in his seminal volume Theories of nationalism (1971). Once again we are indebted to Anthony Smith, this time for gathering together a selection of his previously published studies from the 1980s and 90s concerned with the origin of nations. The antiquity of nations is a signicant interpretation of the evolution of the concept of nationhood and its related sociopolitical expression in nationalism. Smiths opening chapter provides key conceptual guidelines, sets the intellectual context and provides an introduction to several inuential paradigms such as primordialism, perennialism, and modernism. The author then analyses the critical differences between ethnie and nation, adding modications to earlier denitions and formulations. His discussion here, as throughout the nine chapters which follow, is rich and assured. But what characterizes Smiths work above all else is the uency with which he utilizes key features and facts from antiquity, particularly ancient Jewish traditions and the Classical period, to reveal the limitations of modernist thought. Thus he reminds us why it is so hard to dene nations and nationalism only from within a modernizing

world war. If widespread panic was averted because the populations of the countries affected were, in effect, under military rule, then a repeat of this epidemic not in wartime could be far more devastating than even this disease was. All these questions are of great current interest given recent outbreaks of various news strains of influenza and the mass slaughter of animal populations in the far east to contain any spread of new diseases to humans. There may simply not be enough information to answer these questions, nor to describe in more detail the spread of the disease outside of the English-speaking world. But it is odd to me at least that just 41 pages, less than 5%, of this book should be devoted to the most devastating war epidemic of all. Perhaps if the book were not so long and allencompassing I would not be concerned about only 41 pages on inuenza. Perhaps I am biased, as this is the epidemic most likely to have affected me had any of my four grandparents succumbed in their childhood I would not be writing this. Of past epidemics to fear most, 1918/19 ranks rst and is too easily forgotten by the survivors. This is not an easy book to read and is clearly not meant to be read cover to cover. But it is a masterpiece of academic study and a vital record of the devastating effects of war on human populations through wars ability to create, incubate, spread, and worsen the effects of disease far beyond the effects of war itself. Although the book is dedicated to peace, its authors end by suggesting that: War-associated disease, like the poor, is likely always to be with us (p. 731). Given the rapid growth of wars and war-related deaths worldwide in recent decades, the huge rise in international travel and the spread of diseases in general, the size of the human population in general and its enhanced susceptibility to disease as a result of its growth, and that the polarization of resources in the world between rich and poor which means that most are increasingly ill equipped to cope with the consequences of epidemic, if war and its associated diseases continue to multiply much longer there will at

Book reviews context. The most difcult task it would seem is to remain sensitive to the need not to dismiss earlier manifestations of nationhood when handling historical data in the light of general frameworks and concepts (p. 26). The authors voice throughout the volume is that of an enlightened teacher, reasoning, probing, cajoling, and repositioning material in such a syncretic manner than one is forced to reconsider many of the givens of nationalist theory. The volume is in two parts. The rst four chapters are devoted to theory while the remaining ve chapters have an avowedly historical orientation. Chapters one and two offer a critique of modernist thought by focusing on the salience of the mythical nature of perennialist and nationalist accounts. The author seeks to counter the claims of the modernists who seek to deconstruct the myth of the modern nation. Smiths argument is that modernists have overplayed their hand when they emphasize the impact of industry, capitalism and bureaucracy on the creation of nations today. Continuity across different historical periods is lost because of the insistence of counterposing traditional and modern conceptions of sociopolitical change. This in turn, either wittingly or unwittingly, undervalues the deep roots of nations and nationalisms in the ethnic substratum, producing a shallow historical interpretation. Ideology, not reality, blinds modernists into ignoring the very significant purchase which the myths of nationhood have on the appeal of contemporary nationalism. This comes into full focus when Smith critiques the work of Ernest Gellner, his former teacher. Their disagreement rests on the relationship between nations and their putative pasts. Gellner tended to espouse a modernist perspective which argued for a relatively radical emergence of the fully formed nation as a result of the development of high culture following modernization. Smith believes that this perspective ignores the power of collective memory and demotes the value of low culture in nation-formation. In Chapter three he takes issue with another set of modernizers, theorists such as Hobsbawm,

707

Ranger and Anderson who give primacy to the invention of nations and have popularized the notion of the historical imagination as a mechanism for social solidarity. In keeping with his concern to honour the antiquity of identity, Smith emphasizes the need to rediscover, reinterpret and reconstruct the various strands which conduce to form a nation from the pre-existent sociocultural and symbolic materials. The test for the veracity of the contending theories, Smith avers, is to question what the inventors of modern nationhood thought they were about. Were they self-consciously inventing a past which history had neglected to furnish or were they selectively reviving elements of an admittedly incoherent and fragmented ethnie? By placing too much emphasis on the modularity of invented nations, Smith argues that theorists such as Anderson have traduced the role of the intellectuals, artist-celebrators and others who worked on historical memories, myths, traditions, rituals, symbols and artifacts to produce the contours of the modern nation. Many of the deciencies of the modernist perspective are derived from the Eurocentric assumptions of classical social theory which not only claimed to offer and explanation as to how the world was changing but also as to how it should change. Granted Marx, Weber and Durkheim did not place nationalist concerns at the centre of their theories; nevertheless there is enough evidence to suggest that nationalist-like issues did preoccupy the grand theorists. Why then does Smith nd fault with such theorists? Part of his answer is that they were too sociological in orientation and implication. A greater dependence on anthropology, political science, history and geography would have removed some of the abstract, timeless, character of their macrotheory and furnished successive generations of scholars with a more contextually rich series of generalizations with which to interpret the rise and spread of nationalism in a global economy. In Part Two, Smith seeks to answer several key questions which have preoccupied

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Book reviews example, Armenia, Catalonia, Egypt, Ireland, Kashmir and Russia. The outline for such a study has been traced by Professor Smith and his colleagues within the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. But the contextual details remain to be lled in so that Smiths brilliant insights can be fully realized.

nationalist theoreticians. These include whether we can speak of nations in the ancient world. What effect did warfare have on the development of ethnicity? Was there ever a Golden Age from which projects of National Renewal derived their strength and sustenance? What are the Romantic roots of nationalist ideologies? In seeking answers Smith points to an obvious, if not always central feature of these concerns, namely the role of religious leaders and the secular intelligentsia in promoting nationalism and ethnolinguistic vitality. In truth most of the earlier historical examples Smith cites come closer to a sense of national sentiment rather than outright nationalism. Thus we can agree that there was a form of a Jewish nation which strove to free itself from Roman occupation in the rst century after Christ. But were the Zealots waging war la nationalist guerrilla campaign, as Brandon (1967) would claim, in what Smith calls an example of retrospective nationalism. Or is such conjecture overusing the metaphor of the nation in order to justify and legitimize the ancient lineage of Jewish claims to authenticity and possession of the land? Similarly, was the revolt of the Macabees an expression of anti-colonial nationalism in defence of the Jewish homeland? The answer is as much a matter of faith and ideology as it is of historical reasoning. Where Smiths writings help is in the analysis of the process of aterritorialization, dened as the possession of particular historic lands, or ancestral homelands, within recognized borders, and the development of collective attachment to them (p. 17). Smiths work on this process has been somewhat inuential within political geography (see the critique by Jones et al., 2004: 8298). But his general claims as to the longevity of nations have not been fully exploited by spatially aware social scientists, at least not through a series of detailed geographically informed case studies. Thus it would be a signicant advance in the eld were political and historical geographers to attempt a comparative analysis of nation formation in such disparate contexts as, for

Colin H. Williams Cardiff University

Brandon, S.G.F 1967: Jesus and the Zealots. Manchester: . Manchester University Press. Jones, M., Jones, R. and Woods, M. 2004: An introduction to political geography. London: Routledge. Smith, A.D. 1971: Theories of nationalism. London: Duckworth Press.

Strang, V. 2004: The meaning of water. Oxford: Berg. ix 274 pp. 55 cloth, 17.99 paper. ISBN: 1 85973 748 X cloth, 1 85973 753 6 paper. DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070208 Veronica Strang has produced a wide-ranging and absorbing account of water uses and users in contemporary England. Set in the largely rural Stour Valley, the book builds on detailed interviews, focus groups, and participation observation (including time spent puttering about in boats and fishing with riverside anglers) to construct an analysis which weaves together political economy, psychoanalysis, cultural history, ecology and ethnography to dissect the meaning of water for valley dwellers. The theme of nature-culture relationships is central to the book. Citing Ingold and Descola as sources of inspiration, Strang notes in the introduction that her focus on the materiality of social life is intended to engage with the question of agency (both human and non-human) and to grapple with human-environment relationships. Water is a tting topic for this theoretical agenda:
as the substance that is literally essential to all living organisms, water is experienced and embodied both physically and culturally. The

Book reviews
meanings in it are not imposed from a distance, but emerge from an intimate interaction involving ingestion and expulsion, contact and immersion. Engagement with water is the perfect example of a recursive relationship in which nature and culture literally flow into each other. (pp. 45)

709

This interpenetration of nature and culture provides a unifying theme for the ve sections of the book. Part I (Cultural landscapes) provides a historical overview of social, economic, and ecological changes which have occurred in the Stour Valley; a sort of potted political ecology (although the author does not use this terminology) which sets the stage for the authors contemporary analysis. Part II (Under water) discusses the biophysical properties of water and considers the relationship between the sensory experience of water and the construction of meaning. Strang focuses on the relationship between metaphors of water imagery and the production of ideas about the self, and on models of the relationship between individuals and their environments. In one of the most original sections of the book, Strang explores how the sensory, psychoanalytic, and mythological dimensions of water are expressed through water-use practices: from the sacred (such as the use of water in religious practices) through to such mundane choices as who goes rst when families bathe serially (usually the youngest, as they are perceived to be morally and spiritually, although not necessarily physically, cleanest). Part III (Hydrolatry and hydrology) examines religious and secular cosmological models in which images and metaphors of water play a central role. The book briey documents the influence of Celtic well worship, biblically inspired ideas of living water, Roman water deities, and contemporary paganism on religious beliefs in holy water and healing wells. Strang then pairs this analysis with an exploration of scientic cosmological models of water resources, the hydrological cycle, and aquatic ecology with beliefs inspired by secular hydrolatry regarding notions of purity and pollution, and the healing of disease-producing

powers of water. This analysis of secular, scientic, and spiritual hydro-cosmologies is, in turn, developed to explore how different beliefs about water underlie metaphors about the proper functioning of social systems: bodies, ecosystems, and communities. Persistent and striking across a range of informants and cosmologies is the belief that water is linked directly to spiritual needs, identities, and a sense of healthy, safe communities; disruptions to aquatic systems are thus read as disruptions to selves and the social order. This discussion foreshadows the analysis following section of the reactions of Stour Valley residents to the most controversial change in water management in the past few decades: the privatization of the water supply sector. Part IV (Owning water) examines how cosmologies of water-shaped public responses to, and concern about the privatization of the water-supply industry in England and Wales in 1989. Strang situates her analysis within a historical summary of the progressive loss of control over water by ordinary citizens, whereby what Jean-Paul Goubert calls the industrialization of water imposes a rule of experts over supply management (Goubert, 1989), and gradual political centralization removes water management from local control. The central question of privatization thus becomes that of the relationship between water and people; only when people were alienated from water, Strang claims, could privatization have been implemented and citizens accepted their conversion into customers. Yet the book presents evidence that cleverly undercuts this storyline: multiple rationalities and cosmologies nely attuned to the social, cultural, and ecological differences between multiple waters (rather than the singular H2O of both social and physical science) continue to exist just beneath the surface, and underlie ongoing resistance to privatization. The discussion of privatization is perhaps one of the most original contributions of the book. Most of the (limited) research on attitudes towards privatization has tended to focus solely on socio-economic issues, framed

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Book reviews hydrocosmologies and socio-economic analysis, to explain why individuation, privatization, centralization, and alienation from water combine to produce new patterns of water use in which agrant rather than frugal use becomes yet another vehicle for conspicuous consumption resistant to demand management and water conservation measures enacted by the water-supply industry. Readers interested in water (and the political ecology of resources more generally) will learn much from this work. The book makes a limited contribution, however, to more general theoretical debates. Despite acknowledging the relevance of nature-culture debates, Strang does not enter into sustained conceptual conversations with the many theorists she mentions in passing: Hegel and Bourdieu when discussing engagement with the environment; Freud and Jung when examining images of water and psychoanalysis; Mary Douglas when explaining the links between metaphors of water, pollution beliefs and moral values to name just a few. The centrepiece of the analysis remains the ethnographical eldwork, with a largely number of direct quotes punctuating (and at times propping up) the narrative. This is perhaps the greatest shortcoming of the book; it provides a series of fascinating ethnographical snapshots without developing the analysis into a conceptual discussion of more general relevance. Nonetheless, Strangs book is to be recommended for its innovative, detailed, and often surprising account of waters many meanings.

within a class or narrowly socio-economic analysis. Strangs analysis, in contrast, begins from a very different starting point: the complex and diverse hydro-cosmologies through which people interpret not only ownership of water supply infrastructure, but also the equity of water pricing and metering, the ethics of water consumption, and the identity of water itself often as something transcendental to the merely economic or class-based. Part V (Managing water) documents the activities of local groups actively involved in water management, through work relationships (industry, agriculture) and conservation activities. Strang documents how these activities allow local groups to enact a degree of collective control over local water resources which stands in marked contrast to processes of centralization and privatization of the water-supply industry which are widely seen to have removed water from local, public control. Simultaneously, she explores how competing water uses (particularly between farmers and environmental groups) invoke often incommensurate water cosmologies, which have been critical in the gradual compartmentalization of rural space which now excludes people from access to water to a much greater degree than in the past. Noting that the groups controlling or engaging in debate over water resources management are highly male-dominated, Strang turns in Part VI (Contraows) to a consideration of domestic water users, and asks how cosmologies of water affect patterns of water use and consumers understandings of water quality. Here Strang addresses a conundrum for the water-supply industry: while expressing concern about overuse of water and environmental degradation, individuals continue to refuse to limit their usage, and in fact per capita use continues to increase, despite regular warnings of water scarcity and appeals to conserve water in southeastern England. Here the analysis artfully weaves together

Karen Bakker University of British Columbia

Goubert, I.P 1989: The conquest of water: the advent of . health in the industrial age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.