There are a number of things that make this anthology an excellent departure point for further thought and study. As a third year Geography student, bored with practical geography that felt like fourth form social studies and hungry for theory, this anthology provided me with an expansive, comfy place to rest as I worked out my own ideas and principles, recognising the things that attracted me to Geography, and understanding the things that will keep me attached to the discipline as my life and job change over the years.
Clarence Glacken said in Traces on the Rhodian Shore, his magnum opus about the way nature and the environment have been viewed over the centuries, that there have always been three key ideas about the environment in the history of Western Thought. The editors of this anthology have taken a similar approach to the way they have organised their readings under general themes or concepts that have always been relevant to Geographers: Region, Nature, Culture, Time, Space, and Place. This allows them to gather extracts taken from fundamentally important essays in a way that is useful and informative, in ways that are both historical and practical. The chapters allow you to contrast different approaches that Geographers have taken to key concepts, producing an anthology that is supremely functional, as all great anthologies should be. The readings are challenging, but manageable, and have been selected carefully to provide a budding Historical or Theoretical Geographer with not only the most well known, but also the formally overlooked, providing a well-rounded and fairly un-biased collection. The different paradigms carry equal weighting, allowing you a sense of the struggle that has occured between quantitative and qualitative schools over the years.
There's something for everyone. Kropotkin, Mackinder, Sauer, Glacken, Haagerstrad, Tuan, Anne Buttimer, Aldo Leopold. The anthology also has helpful introductory pages for each thinker with well written, concise biographies outlining their contribution to the discipline, as well as theoretical influences and heirs. Anything but dry, and as useful as any social research methods handbook. Don't discount or neglect the theory when it's been presented in such a stimulating and accessible format as this!
