Why Greenland Is An Island, Australia Is Not—And Japan Is Up For Grabs: A Simple Primer For Becoming A Geographical Know-It-All, by Joyce Davis

For a certain sort of person, becoming a know-it-all comes somewhat naturally and easy, as easy as reading books like this one. In certain superficial aspects, this book is a lot like another one I recently read, Don’t Know Much About Geography [1]. It was written in the aftermath of the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union when the (re)birth of many long-forgotten nations like Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Namibia, Somaliland, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia, to name but a few of the most obvious examples [2] and increasing American involvement in various post-Cold War imbroglios in the Middle East, Balkans, and Greater Africa (including Haiti) made understanding geography a necessary task if one wanted to understand what was being reported on the evening news. Both books discuss political and physical geography, and focus on areas of interest for Americans, such as rivers and big cities, and states and their capitals and so on. On at least a surface level, at least, there was a wide degree of agreement as to what sorts of materials would make for a worthwhile book of geography and where ignorance was most profound. Both books even cite the same depressing statistics that show how teens and young adults in the United States were more ignorant in geographic knowledge than their counterparts in every other nation surveyed.

That said, there are some serious difference between these books, and most of them are in favor of this volume. Coming in at just over 100 pages, including some substantial amounts of matching and fill in the blank material, this book is designed as a homeschool or parochial school introductory geography text. Although it is very small in size, it is a very worthwhile text for its purposes because it uses the current events that become obsolete and out of date as case studies for teaching skills that remain valid long after certain areas of geography are out of the headlines. And that makes this book of value, in that it teaches an approach to geography that is of enduring worth, a habit of mind that allows one to handle maps and navigations, to realize that maps are often deliberately wrong to preserve copyrights, and to realize the importance of geography and history to life, which leads the reader to a greater sensitivity towards the social sciences and humanities and their importance. It does all of this, moreover, without overt and illegitimate leftist political agendas, which makes it a far better book than most of its competitors. Its contents are somewhat straightforward, dealing with nomenclature, territories in the news in the early 1990’s, physical geography, important trivia about various countries, map reading skills, the global big picture of hemispheres, time zones, and geography, continents, large cities, the language of location (a glossary of handy geographic terms), and a closing geography bee to test comprehension. The book is suitable for bright elementary school students and middle school students studying world geography, even if its discussion of early 1990’s current events geography is a little bit out of date.

The approach that the book teaches has a few steps. First, identify the geographical issue. Then, study the relevant maps provided in one’s source. Then compare these maps with more detailed ones. After this, look at large-area maps to put the area under question in its larger context. Then, combine this geographical analysis with information learned from other sources, like history and biographical information. Finally, try to picture the scene by combining this knowledge together, visualizing what it means. This is a worthwhile ongoing strategy to adopt for looking intelligently at world affairs, considering that some places are consistent sources of trouble for reasons of predictable human and physical geography. As the author says, this approach makes the student light years ahead of those who fail to take geography into consideration, which is most people, and that sensible approach makes this book, as short as it is, light years ahead of many which seek to teach a corrupt leftist ideology without teaching students how to become fit analysts of the world around us ourselves. This book succeeds at its chosen task, a worthwhile task, and does so in a way that keeps it from being a mere artifact of the geopolitics of my own early teenage years when I would have been the target audience of this book.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/book-review-dont-know-much-about-geography/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/book-review-the-kaisers-holocaust/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/today-in-history-on-july-23-1940-the-united-states-denied-the-legitimacy-of-the-soviet-takeover-of-the-baltic-states/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/08/11/book-review-the-hidden-europe/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/today-in-history-on-june-26-1960-somaliland-become-an-independent-nation-for-the-first-time/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/today-in-history-on-may-18-1991-somaliland-became-a-nation-for-the-second-time/