Content area
Full text
Geography's Inner Worlds: Pervasive Themes in Contemporary American Geography h as the unenviable task of constructing an account of the 'cohesion and core' of geograp hy. A self - described update of the forty - year - old American Geography: Inventory and Pr ospect, Geography's Inner Worlds shares with its predecessor a desire to define who geog raphers are, what they do, and how they do it. Geography's Inner Worlds, however, differs fr om American Geography in that it is less of an inventory of past work and plan for the futur e than it is a map intended to give all geographers a sense of the territory they share as geograph ers. Such a goal - the mapping of an 'implicit sub text' which "reveals the persistent, inherent t hemes that unify what sometimes sounds like a babble of conflicting voices" - distinguishes it fr om another recent book about geography, Livingstone's The Geographic Tradition which is at once mo re historically grounded and less willing to make claims for a persistent core for geography. The success of Geography's Inner Worlds depends not only on how well it maps out an 'implicit sub text' for geography, but also on how well it justifies privileging such allegedl y unifying generalizations.
Geography's Inner Worlds defines the 'core of geography' as "the set of ass umptions, concepts, models, and theories that geographers bring to their research and teac hing." Most of the sixteen chapters in the book are devoted to one facet of this 'core.' The s ixteen chapters are organized into four sections. 'What Geography is About' establishes a general c ontext in three chapters which discuss "things geographers do regardless of specialty or empiric al interest": studies exploring the overlap of human and physical worlds, places and regions, and the role of visual representations as a means of thinking and expression in geography. 'Wha t Geographers Do' consists of five chapters which discuss the distinctive perspectives geograp hers bring to methods of observation, visualization, analysis, modeling, and communication. ' How Geographers Think' defines and reviews four general concepts in geography, the l ocation - place - region - space continuum, movements, cycles, and systems, the local to global continuum, and scale. 'Why Geographers Think That...