The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Geography, by Thomas E. Sherer Jr., Thom Werthman, and Joseph Gonzalez

Seldom is there a case where a book’s subject matter is so obvious. Geography is a subject of considerable importance and also considerable ignorance, and this particular book was written in order to deal with the ignorance that people have about the world. When looking at this book, I figured that it would have a lot of worthwhile information, and likely a somewhat breezy approach, and I was not disappointed. It is worth noting, though, that there are many ways to approach geography as a subject, and not all of them get the same amount of attention. Depending on whether or not you prefer a focus on physical or human geography, you will enjoy different texts more. As a reader, I found this book to have a particular focus not only on human geography over physical geography, but for political geography as opposed to other aspects of human geography. This is likely to be an area that has a lot of interest and certainly a lot of relevance, but it is also most likely to be quickly dated and also to be the most controversial, which may not be to everyone’s taste.

In terms of its contents, this particular book is a surprisingly quick read at around 325 pages of material. It is divided into five parts. The first part of the book consists of six chapters that give an overview of geography as a subject (I), and include chapters on defining geography (1), physical geography (2), cultural geography (3), with a special focus on peoples, languages, and religion, human geography (4), with a look at both human accomplishments and problems, maps (5), and an explanation of the book’s regional approach (6). The second part of the book is a region-by-region look at the developed world (II), with chapters on the following areas: the United States and Canada (7), the British Isles (8), Western Europe (9), including France, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, Scandinavia (10), the Southern European countries of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece as well as the microstates of Andorra, San Marino, and Vatican City (11), Japan (12), the East Asian countries of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (13), and Australia and New Zealand (14). The third part of the book contains three chapters on those nations in transition between Communism and capitalism (III), namely Eastern Europe (15), Russia (16), and China, with cameos by Mongolia and North Korea (17). The fourth section of the world talks about all of the other regions of the world (IV), and we mean all of them, including Central America and the Caribbean (18), South America (19), North Africa and the Sahel to the Horn of Africa (20), Sub-Saharan Africa (21), the Middle East and Central Asia (22), South Asia (23), Southeast Asia (24), Oceania (25), and the polar regions of the world (26). The fifth and final part of the book provide three chapters that deal with global issues in geography (V), including population growth (27), saving the atmosphere (28), and meeting energy and water needs (29), after which there is an index.

In reading this book I found the author’s knowledge to be a bit superficial, which is to be expected given the immense scope of the book, and I also found that the author’s focus was a bit too much on the period that was contemporary at the time the book was written. In talking about Spain’s regions, the book emphasized Basque and not Catalan separatism, for example. In many cases, the book takes the claims of governments about their respect for autonomous regions more or less at face value rather than being sufficiently critical of them. Still, this is a one-volume mass-market book on geography, there is no way that it is going to cover everything of interest to geography to a reader like myself, or even to cover anything in a great deal of depth. What it sets out to do is provide a basic and fundamental approach to seeing the broad scope of geography and issues that all of humanity has to deal with. Not everything said about these subjects is going to be to everyone’s liking, but it has a modest goal and manages to achieve that modest goal pretty well. You can certainly do a lot worse and at least this book would manage to spark a deeper conversation about what is going on all over the world, and that is likely what this book was aiming at, allowing people to know enough to be able to address geographical matters around the world, which makes it a success in my own view.