The Penguin State Of The World Atlas, by Dan Smith

Now, I happen to like Penguin as a publisher, mainly because they do a good job making inexpensive and easily accessible books from works in the public domain that I have enjoyed reading for decades now, at least since I was a broke university student. That said, calling this book an atlas is a considerable stretch of the term. If one has certain expectations of an atlas, it is that it has helpful and useful maps that help to better explain and understand the world. Geography has many forms, but all of those forms involve spatial connections of some kind. This book is, at best, a lot of tedious lectures about the state of the world from people whose perspectives are not particularly trustworthy (given their leftist perspectives and general whining, Progressive, tone). Most of the issues discussed in this book are not the sort that are well-suited to a broad-brush and nearly contextless discussion, as is provided here, and without sufficient context what few maps are provided are not as helpful as they could have been. For example, Japan is shown as being a heavily indebted nation, but its debt is mainly to its own citizens whose savings accounts fund the bonds that keep Japan running, which is in stark contrast to those nations whose sovereign debt is held by outsiders. Yet this context is not shown. Similarly, the authors of this book seem to think that the death penalty is a bad thing, and this assumption is worded into the language used to discuss those nations that have it.

In general, this book comes awfully close if it does not entirely cross into the line of lying by statistics. For example, the book cites (42) an alternative view of quality of life that was released by noted happy nation North Korea that demonstrated the biased nature of a great many of the rankings that are used by the book, without apparent self-knowledge. Even where the data included is not badly in need of explanations that are not provided, a lot of the book’s space is wasted by ugly graphics, including a citation of relative human development that shows green, orange, red, and yellow colored lines connecting nations in a way that does not even look complete, and certainly is a waste of space, especially when the map next to it shows the same information in a much more appealing fashion. Perhaps the author of this book and those who came up with the graphics of the book want to be praised for trying to convey data in novel forms, but as much of the data is of dubious quality (the map for assigning the share of carbon dioxide goes all the way back to 1950 and as a result grossly underestimates the share of current emissions from China and India, for example), and where the book is filled with text, the text is often misleading and of a hectoring quality, which does not make this book as good as it could have been. To be sure, no state of the world would have looked like a good one, but this one is dire for the wrong reasons.

This book is less than 150 pages long and is divided into seven parts. After information about the author, an introduction, a discussion of the problems with maps, and acknowledgements, the first part are maps that discuss who we are–looking at the nations of the world, population, life expectancy, ethnicity and diversity, religious beliefs, literacy and education, urbanization, and the diversity of cities. The second part of the book examines wealth and poverty through a look at income, inequality, the supposed quality of life, transnationals, banks, corruption, debt, tourism, and goals for development. The third part of the book examines war and peace by viewing wars in the 21st century, warlords, ganglords, and militas, military muscle, the new front line of cyberspace, casualties of war, refugees, peacekpeeping, and global peacefulness. The fourth part of the book deals with rights and respect through looking at political systems, religious rights, human rights, children’s rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. The heath of the people is the subject of part five, which examines malnutrition, obesity, smoking, cancer, HIV/AIDS, mental health, and living with disease. The health of the planet forms the subject of the sixth part of the book through looking at warning signs, biodiversity, water resources, waste, energy use, climate change, and planetary boundaries–rather vaguely defined neo-malthusian ideas, it must be admitted. The seventh and last part of the book gives tables of supposedly vital statistics, after which the book ends with notes and sources and an index.