THE LOST ART OF FINDING OUR WAY .  John Edward Huth.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2013. 544 pp., maps, diagrams, appendices, glossary, notes, index. $ 35.00 cloth. (ISBN 978-0-674-07282-4)

Reviewed by Harm de Blij

Stand on a city sidewalk near the exit stairs from the subway (for example in Manhattan at Penn Station) as the crowd emerges from the comparative darkness, and you can observe a phenomenon that would have Harvard Professor Huth shake his head in despair. A few arrivals look up and down the intersecting avenue and street, recognize and point to landmarks, and rubberneck their way into the city. Many more, though, have their eyes focused on an electronic gadget, navigating their route from directions on a screen, never checking just where they are in the urban landscape. “As informational technology has grown,” Huth writes, “our ability to perceive and think independently without help from devices may be compromised to the point where we, not our forebears, are the primitive ones”  (pp. 1 -2). This applies to fog-shrouded coastlines as well as tangled urban settings, and with this terrific book he seeks to reverse the trend.

     Professor Huth teaches at Harvard University, but The Lost Art of Finding Our Way is not the stuff of his career as Donner Professor of Science in the Physics Department. An outdoor enthusiast throughout his life, he taught himself navigational techniques and studied the voyaging skills of peoples such as the Netsilik Inuit and the Caroline Islanders. This book, a veritable encyclopedia of advice and instruction for adventurers who may find themselves having to rely on their intuitive skills for survival, had its origins in a dramatic incident in 2003. Kayaking in Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod, Huth had taken note of wind and swell and, when a fog enveloped him, could steer toward the shore and follow the coast to safety. But less than a half mile away and unbeknown to him, two young women just offshore became disoriented in the same fog, turned toward the open sea , and perished. The book is dedicated to their memories, and aims to raise environmental awareness that can save lives.

     Even before the book appeared, Professor Huth was teaching a freshman seminar, Primitive Navigation, at Harvard University. He also offered a General Education course on broader topics that seems,  for many geographers, to  mirror the physical geography course that forms part of the core curriculum of geography departments nationwide (though not at Harvard).  Indeed, to scan The Lost Art Of Finding Our Way is to run across numerous familiar geographic topics and illustrations whose relevance to the “lost art” may not be immediately obvious – until the author’s skillful narrative points the way. From map projections to cloud formations and from  cold fronts to warm currents, the basics of physical geography are put in practical context.

     The book’s 18 chapters are divided – not formally – into two groups. The first eight address navigation as way-finding in historic and practical contexts while the last ten “focus on factors that might seem at first blush to be more subtle but that end up being critical to navigation before GPS” (p.  10).  The closing chapter retells the legendary story of Baintabu, a female navigator in the Gilbert Islands of the 1780s, who was thrown overboard from the lead canoe during the return from a raiding party and was rescued by the last canoe, which turned out to be the only one that made it home. The moral of the story takes some time to emerge, but it is a fitting finale to a book full of practical advice, anecdotal information, and sometimes fanciful  tales. The reader can almost hear Professor Huth lecturing as the narrative is in the first person, addresses its audience as “you”, and is, at times, in need of editorial condensation. So much the better: its breezy and conversational style has a way of easing some challenging technical hurdles.

     The crux of way-finding lies in the formation of mental maps, which is why Chapter 2, “Maps in the Mind”, is of special interest. This crucial chapter, not the most successful among the 18, opens with an engaging if not novel description of the way people in certain particular environmental settings “organize their space” (p. 13). Describing Inuit hunters, Norse explorers, and Caroline Island navigators, Huth details local strategies for mental-map formulation, orientation, and way-finding, speculating on the Norse from  strands of Viking navigational lore. Arriving at the key issue, he reports that “some part of the mind is able to assimilate, store, and recall what are effectively mental maps.  How does this work?” (p. 23). The next six pages refer to psychology’s route knowledge and survey knowledge distinction, address some (very few) of the advances neuroscientists are making, comment briefly on mammal territoriality and trail-marking habits, say nothing about non-mammal migration (marine navigators surely find seasonal bird migrations useful  in orientation, a topic not touched on until Chapter 17)  and ignore studies by geographers. A memorable article by C. Trowbridge in Science a century ago set the stage, but author and readers would also benefit from P. Gould and R. White’s 1974 classic, Mental Maps;  R. Kitchen and M. Blades’s Cognition of Geographic Space (2002);  and R. Downs and D. Stea’s Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior (2005). This chapter also would have benefited from a more robust introduction to the concept of scale. Much of what follows in this book has to do with distance – from safe shorelines, from remote islands, from dangerous squalls – and chapter 4, titled “Dead Reckoning”, presents fascinating  and practical insights on this. But scale is a crucial factor in the formulation of mental maps, and its implications would seem to merit emphasis here.

     Reflecting on this chapter I was taken back to an incident following a May, 2013 public lecture in Oklahoma City where, as usual, I had made mention of mental maps and their cultural, age, gender, and other manifestations. Following that lecture a listener approached me and stated that he had what he called an infallible “sixth sense” of direction. I stuck out my arm and asked him to tell me where it was pointing, and he said, “just off WNW. “ In a subsequent interview (Smith, 2013) he reported that his “mental compass” was so accurate that he would know, for example, that a ship he was on had changed direction by a few degrees during an overnight sail. It made me think of the impact of perfect (absolute) pitch in the Western population – one in about 10,000 but with disproportionate impact on the evolution of Western music – and might such instilled directional knowledge have been more common in ancient times, and might seafarers possessing it have led some of those expeditions we now seek to understand?

     If this early chapter raises some unanswered questions, the next one, “On Being Lost”, sets the stage for an information-packed, awareness-raising traverse so intense and comprehensive that it defies summation. In “Urban Myths of Navigation” the topics range from the orientation of churches to that of satellite dishes; if you think there’s little that could be new in “Maps and Compasses”, think again. Professor Huth may not have intended it, but I am going to put a compass and a flashlight in the trunk of my decade-old sedan, just in case.  I now know how to use a compass for more than routine purposes.  And if there is much that would be familiar to geographers in the chapters on the stars, Sun and Moon, well, prepare to be surprised as well as entertained. There is an explanation for that Arab city my mother and I saw vividly, camels, palm trees and all, on the horizon from a beach on the Dutch island of Terschelling on July 17, 1947. Escape from a prison in Mogadishu, and you can walk your way to safety … if you can “read” the night sky.                                                                                                                                                                   

     But here is something  less surprising: in 1987 filmmakers interviewed a group of 23 graduating Harvard seniors and faculty members, asking them “why it’s cold in the winter and warm in the summer” (p.163). Twenty-one of the 23 gave the wrong answer, saying that the Earth is closer to the Sun in summer.  The producers of the film suggested that this had to do with significant flaws in the way science is taught. More likely, it reflected the absence of physical geography from the Harvard College curriculum, an absence for which Professor Huth’s General Education course obviously was a welcome remedy.

     The second set of chapters ranges even farther afield. Anyone teaching a physical geography course will find marvelous nuggets of practical relevance to enliven topics that can so easily mire in technical detail, but there is much more: on the physics of watercraft and the speed and stability of hulls, historic and modern; on sailing against the wind and the evolving design and current near-extinction of sails; on aircraft, their prominent routes and navigation lights, revealing directional information to someone lost on the ground; on “glowing” planets and “twinkling” stars. Throughout, the message is: be aware of your environment! Pay attention to nature’s signals! Don’t rely solely on electronic gadgets and devices to guide you!

     To return to those New York subway stairs, the easy answer to Professor Huth would be that we no longer use the abacus but can still add and subtract, and that the calculator and computer have not extinguished knowledge of mathematics. I am not sure we can in fact still add and subtract, and international tests show that Americans’ knowledge of mathematics is somewhere near that of geography, in the dismal range. But a bigger issue arises from this book. Our dependence on power-based technology is not only individual and gadget-scale; it is also collective and universal.  We are creating a total dependence on power systems without backups and at times we are reminded of the risks when storms cause relatively brief and local power outages. But the greatest potential danger to the entire system (greater even than looming cyber attacks) is solar, not planetary. It’s not that we have had no warning; it’s just that life spans and memories are short. On August 28, 1859 the Sun smashed a billion-ton ball of protons through the Earth’s magnetic shield at several million kilometers per hour, a solar superstorm that repositioned the northern aurora over the Caribbean, created a fantastic light show, and disabled elementary telegraph systems worldwide. Were such an event to occur today, it would melt satellites, immobilize computers, neutralize cell phones, cancel GPS navigation, eliminate television, ground airliners, and generate worldwide blackouts. Cost estimates range into the tens of trillions; estimated recovery might take between four and ten years. It would be a good time to light a candle and re-read The Lost Art Of Finding Our Way.

Citations

De Blij, H. , 2013    “An Unusual Aptitude”.  Interview with Carl Michael Smith. AAG Newsletter, August (?).

Downs, R. and Stea, D. (eds), 2005.  Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior.  New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Gould, P. and White, R.  1974.  Mental Maps.  Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Kitchen, R. and Blades, M.  2002.  The Cognition of Geographic Space.  New York: Tauris & Co.

Trowbridge, C.  1913.  “On Fundamental Methods of Orientation and ‘Imaginary’ Maps”. Science, 38 (990), 888-896.

Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography. New York: Random House 2012.xxii and 403 pp, maps, notes; index.

Reviewed in The Geographical Review, Vol. 103, No. 2, April, 2013, pp. 304-305.

The title of Robert Kaplan’s latest book suggests something ominous: a vengeful geography lurking somewhere on (or beneath) Thomas Friedman’s flat world, ready to wreak its wrath on the spatially ignorant. The subtitle hints at something rather less dramatic: “What the map tells us about coming conflicts and the battle against fate.” But the contents range from the brilliant to the banal in ways that make it worth reading, for Mr. Kaplan knows as perhaps none other the maps and the places whereof he writes. Some of us remember a time when colleagues who allegedly did not do enough fieldwork were labeled “armchair geographers.” Kaplan may not be a geographer, but geographers will be impressed by his global grasp and, at times, his analytical skills. Less compelling, despite occasional disclaimers, are his adherence to environmental determinism and his apparent ignorance of recent and contemporary scholarship in political geography.

The Revenge of Geography has its origins in an article under that title published in Foreign Policy in 2009. The book is divided into three parts of which the first is an eight-chapter trek from Herodotus to the Heartland, from pre-Minoa to post-Mackinder. Part II describes past and future in six world realms or regions (Europe, Russia, China, India, Iran, Turkey), and the final, single-chapter part focuses on Mexico and the USA’s difficult relations with this crucial neighbor.

Contrasting his book against Friedman’s, Kaplan says that he will “introduce readers to a group of decidedly unfashionable thinkers, who push up hard against the notion that “geography no longer matters” (italics author’s). Geographers who hope that this group may include some unfashionable thinkers in political geography are soon disappointed. To be sure: Kaplan cites a wide range of scholars and strategists – his skillful summations of the views of such authors as Hodgson, Bracken, Braudel and many others are highlights of the book – but few geographers, and no modern ones, make their appearance in his pages. This, of course, also reflects the state of the art. When the redoubtable Saul Cohen is by far the most-cited political geographer in a 2012 book on political-geographical topics, it tells you as much about the fading of a once-prominent field of the discipline as it does about Cohen’s formidable works. Nevertheless, the absence of such names as O’Loughlin, Agnew, Murphy, Fan, Nijman, Blaut, O Tuathail, Flint, and others is not only regrettable but also inexcusable, and has a significant impact on the largely descriptive and weakly analytical Part Two. How James Trapier Lowe’s 700-page Geopolitics and War: Mackinder’s Philosophy of Power (1981) did not merit a mention in Kaplan’s narrative or citation list is – well, incredible.

These caveats notwithstanding, there is much to ponder in The Revenge of Geography. The regurgitation of the various Mackinder-Mahan-Spykman-Haushofer-Kjellen “theses” in Part One is entertaining and takes some of us back to far duller classroom iterations decades ago. It is piquant to see Kaplan accord such gravitas to notions long consigned to the dustbin of geography, and to follow him as he tries to accord current relevance to such old ideas (is Kazakhstan really the new “Mackinder’s Heartland”, p. 185?). This latest book again features Kaplan’s felicitous writing, quick analytical insight, casual references to personal adventures, and bull-in-the-china-shop candor that make the occasional banalities and platitudes consumable.

The book also sheds some light on Kaplan the activist. Early on he mentions having been part of a “group that urged the Bush administration to invade” Iraq (p. 18). He is a self-confessed interventionist: “My book Balkan Ghosts … was reportedly a factor in President Bill Clinton’s decision not to militarily intervene in 1993 (but) I urged intervention on the front page of The Washington Post’s Outlook Section on April 17, 1994 (p. 351)” … “Clinton’s hesitant way of waging war was complicit in large-scale suffering” (p. 16). Those words echo when we are told that “Haushofer’s life is a signal lesson in the dangers inherent for men of ideas who seek desperately to ingratiate themselves with those in power” (p. 86).

If readers are somewhat jaded by the regional descriptions that constitute Part Two, they will be rewarded if they persist and give Part Three, a mere 27 pages, a careful reading. Titled America’s Destiny, its single chapter (Braudel, Mexico, and Grand Strategy) is Kaplan at his most effective, especially when the reader gets past still another ode to an ancien determinist. Braudel’s relevance to the issue at hand may be contrived, but then Kaplan gets to the heart of the matter: United States policy in Eurasia has cost thousands of lives and perhaps a trillion dollars while virtually ignoring the troubles and growing disarray in a state on its southern border whose future will be far more consequential than Iraq or Afghanistan will ever be. “The destiny of the United States will be north-south, rather than the east-west, sea-to-shining-sea of continental and patriotic myth” (p. 333, italics author’s). Mexico, Kaplan argues, “registers far less in the [East-Coast] elite imagination than does Israel or China, or India” (p. 334). We are, he writes, curiously passive about what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that verges on disorder, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined. He urges a new posture that will, over the long term, produce “a cohesive, bilingual super-state-of-sorts with Mexico and Canada” (p. 344), part of a process he refers to earlier as being “healthy for America … as it prepares the world for its own [superpower] obsolescence” (p. 332).

There was a time when political geographers dared address the general reader about the big picture, entering the fray with their own perspectives. It may be the case, as a colleague wrote me, that “no geographer could afford to publish” a book of this kind. Maybe so, but this means that non-geographers will be writing geography for the lay reader, as Paul Krugman has done in his New York Times columns, “discovering” long-dormant geographic concepts and heralding them as newfound truths. Geographers will at times find The Revenge of Geography excruciating, but the book is worth a read, if only as proof that the influential Robert Kaplan understands why geography matters.

Atlas of the Great Plains. By Stephen J. Lavin, Fred M. Shelley, and J. Clark Archer. Foreword by David J. Wishart. Introduction by John C. Hudson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. xvi + 335 pp. Maps, illustrations, bibliography. $ 39.95 cloth.

Reviewed in Great Plains Research Vol. 22, No. 2, Fall, 2012, pp. 203 – 206.

In New York earlier this year I found myself embroiled in a vigorous dinner-party debate over the supposedly declining prospects of printed books, journals, and newspapers. The majority view was that “electronic media” would consign such “products” to the dustbin of history; and as to maps and atlases, surely these would likewise disappear. Certainly the current The National Geographic Atlas of the World would be the Society’s last. Why would anyone need an unwieldy atlas when you can bring up any map on any topic at any scale on your computer screen?

This magnificent, magisterial, sumptuous volume would have silenced even the most ardent advocate of the demise of yet another intellectual symbol of Western civilization. It is an atlas, but it is far more than an assemblage of maps. It is a book, but the narrative is far more than an effective guide to the cartography. It is also unique, even daring in its conception.   

Atlases tend to cover familiar geographic ground: the world, or a continent, occasionally a region (such as Western Europe), often a country (many countries still publish “national” atlases), sometimes a subunit such as a province or a State. In the United States, several State atlases form excellent examples of the last: veritable coffee-table, multicolor, glossy promotion pieces for the State they represent.

But comparatively very few atlases focus on a geographic concept. This is a risky proposition: gone is the safety of an insular continent, an assembly of contiguous countries or the political boundary of a State or province. The regional concept of a Great Plains evokes countless interpretations. Give a hundred informed North Americans each an outline map of the continent and ask them all to draw their conception of the Great Plains region, and you will get one hundred different interpretations. Most would probably be aware that the Great Plains region extends from Texas into Canada. All would know that some States lie entirely within the Great Plains and that others are bisected by the region’s boundary, no matter where it is perceived to lie. That, however, is where the consensus ends. In his introduction, John C. Hudson presents a map showing fifty published versions of the Great Plains boundary (p. 2). Take the outer limits, and the Great Plains extend from Mexico to the Northwest Territories and from eastern Oregon to western Wisconsin. Thus the Great Plains Reference Map, the framework for the entire enterprise, is of special interest (p. 18). Who would know that Fort Worth lies within the Great Plains, but Dallas lies outside? Or that Cheyenne is in, but Laramie is out?

Conceptual regions, being mental constructs, tend to have smooth, sweeping outlines, as is the case with every one of Hudson’s fifty, and with the map of the Great Plains region originally drawn by the doyen of American Great Plains geographers, David J. Wishart (p. 12).  But the regional boundary on the Reference Map is jagged, reflecting one of the challenges the atlas-makers confronted: the problem of data. The atlas is replete with thematic maps, and county data were crucial in constructing these. So the regional boundary’s angular appearance reflects an inescapable quantitative imperative as image is translated into reality. As such, it delimits a region that includes the southern half of Saskatchewan and adjacent corners of Alberta and Manitoba, the eastern sectors of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, all of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, and most of western Oklahoma and Texas. It is a vast region but, as the jacket blurb asserts, it is “a region that has been understudied and overlooked.”

The magnificent Atlas of the Great Plains will do much to change this. If you think of an atlas as a place to look something up, think again. This is an atlas to be read from cover to cover. It constitutes a comprehensive prospectus of a vibrant region whose geographic diversity will surprise readers time and again.

Following the introduction, in which boundary and data issues are addressed and the Great Plains Reference Map is presented at two levels of scale, the atlas is topically divided into eight sections. If these sections seem routine (Land and Environment, History, Population, Rural Settlement and Agriculture, Urban Settlement and Economy, Politics and Government, Recreation and Settlement, and Social Indicators), their respective components are anything but. More than 300 maps, aptly described in David J. Wishart’s Foreword as “not only significant analytically but also works of art”, depict items such as tornado tracks, the diffusion of horses among Native American tribes, population ancestries, the diffusion of irrigation, the Wal-Mart invasion, political-party allegiance, symphony orchestras (paired with rodeos!), and crime rates. Many of these topics presented difficult cartographic challenges: how to show FM radio stations and their range? Or hospital accessibility? Or water loss (and gain) in aquifers?

Importantly, although more than 300 map pages are listed in the Table of Contents, this atlas contains about double that number of individual maps. For example, under the rubric of Population, the Table of Contents lists 24 maps, but many of these consist of sets of two or even four, showing historic or other comparative details. In fact, the Population rubric contains 61 discrete maps in addition to several diagrams. The Atlas of the Great Plains is a veritable mine of information, and there is more to it even than the front matter promises.

In some especially inventive maps, for example one showing daily newspaper circulation (p. 239), the Great Plains region is set in its wider spatial context. Regional newspapers published in the Great Plains region are also read beyond its borders, and some newspapers published outside the region have significant readership within. These maps display the region’s entire external periphery, not only in complete coverage of the States and provinces of which the Great Plains region forms a part, but also of neighboring States from Minnesota to Louisiana. By reflecting the region’s influences beyond its borders as well as external forces radiating inward, such maps yield valuable insights.

Readers will detect some variation in the effectiveness of the coverage under the eight major rubrics. Dramatic scenery may not, by some definitions, be one of the attributes of the Great Plains region, but the series of maps and instructive text describing the region’s physiography are superb, notably those of elevation, topography, drainage, ecology, and aquifers. The map of ecological provinces (p. 31) is one of those set in wider regional context, showing nearly 30 ecologies of which a dozen have a presence within the Great Plains border. The troubling fate of the High Plains Aquifer is dramatically depicted on a map that will give all readers pause (p. 32). If the section on climate lacks the Koppen regionalization that can be so effective in conveying prevailing regimes and misses an opportunity to depict air-mass synoptics in this infamous funnel between tundra and tropics, it is nevertheless enhanced by vivid displays of two of the Great Plains region’s major environmental challenges: tornadoes and hailstorms (p. 43).

Lucid and efficient narrative and splendid maps make Great Plains history come alive in unexpected ways. So much has happened in this vast expanse – Atlas coverage ends before the end of the nineteenth century – that this is of necessity a selective presentation, but there is a wealth of information. Maps of the diffusion of horses among Native American peoples (p. 50), the fragments of reservation (p. 52), the tragic decline and adulteration of the American Bison (pp. 55 and 56), the drama of exploration (pp. 60 – 64), and the advent of military forts and trading posts, railroads, and the beginnings of modern settlement are chronicled on maps one does not find in the usual atlas. The Population rubric follows logically, and in these nearly fifty pages authors and cartographers excel. Guided by engaging text, readers will trace two centuries of changes in regional population density, changing patterns of ethnicity, demographics, and European ancestries (the last on pp. 120 and 121) that will hold some surprises for many.

In this era of modernization and globalization, it can be difficult to render Rural Settlement and Agriculture as a fascinating topic, and in truth this is not the most arresting section of the atlas. While comprehensive on the large issues (wheat cultivation, as the authors say, for many people is synonymous with the Great Plains) and presenting some revealing cartography on the historic expansion of farmland and the spread of irrigation, there is little here about soil types and the particular difficulties Great Plains environments present to farmers. I was surprised to find a section on “miscellaneous crops” without any reference to my favorite: the wine grape. Every State in the Great Plains has a wine industry and the Texas wine industry in particular has achieved national recognition. This would have been a good way to enliven these pages.

Urban Settlement and Economy, the next section, is a treasure trove of information, starting with three memorable illustrations (two of them maps) and eight pages of productive text. A map of metropolitan and micropolitan areas reveals the inaccuracy of a Great Plains conceptualized as a vast, sparsely populated rural area (p. 158), but the regional border superimposed on a “North America at night” satellite image confirms that the major metropolitan areas in the region are located on its fringes (p. 159). And the map showing businesses and institutions using “Great Plains” in their names displays an interesting geographic asymmetry. This section naturally focuses on industry and employment, and pie charts dated a half century apart reveal a quite momentous economic transformation. Also featured under this rubric are income variations, retail giants, and energy production, all depicted on more than 40 (rather than 22 listed) maps. Again the atlas delivers far more than its Table of Contents promises.

The final three sections of the Atlas of the Great Plains constitute in many ways the volume’s apogee. Another stereotype of this region is that its politics are overwhelmingly conservative and dominantly Republican, but 16 maps of U.S. Presidential elections in the Great Plains States (1860 – 2008) and 14 maps of national legislative elections in the United States and Canada (1870 – 2000) indicate otherwise. No atlas of the Great Plains region would be complete without some reference to football, but the first four maps under the rubric of Recreation and Services address symphony orchestras, rodeos, historic landmarks of national import, and powwows. Football, baseball and basketball get their cartographic due, but only after women’s NCAA sports teams are mapped (p. 250). This section ends with three fascinating maps showing the Great Plains birthplaces of selected artists, performers, and writers. Prepare, again, to be surprised. Yet the section that will undoubtedly evoke more discussion than any other is titled Social Indicators, with a range of mapped topics as broad as it is contentious. Great Plains States do not rank high on the ladder of public-school teacher salaries, a circumstance with serious social consequences (p. 277). Canadian sectors of the Great Plains region display far higher rates of robbery and vehicle theft than the “lower” Great Plains. Prisoner incarceration rates in the Canadian sector are much lower than in the U.S. sector. (Is there a lesson here?). Violent crime rates in the U.S. Great Plains are much higher in the south than in the north. The three maps and an accompanying chart on capital punishment and its spatial manifestations will evoke much debate. So, undoubtedly, will the five maps that follow the series on religious adherence: abortions, infant mortality, births to teenage mothers, and the distribution of poverty for the general population and separately for those under age 18. Especially effective narrative explains what the maps display, but there remains plenty of scope for discussion and alternative assessment.

And that is just one of the many dimensions of this spectacular achievement. This is an atlas that educates and informs, but it also is admirably objective and does not conceal flaws past or present, from the fates of Native American peoples to issues of abortion and capital punishment. Even as the Atlas of the Great Plains erases faulty and dated stereotypes about this region, it also focuses on real and current problems and their spatial manifestations.

Preparing for this review I began by scanning the volume and stopping to read several especially interesting maps, finding myself riveted and, it seemed, on a journey of discovery. It has often been said about books, but perhaps never about an atlas – I could not put it down once I had opened it. Nor has any atlas ever enhanced my knowledge of any region as greatly as this one has. There can be no doubt about it: no region, certainly in North America and perhaps in the world, is as well served as is the Great Plains region by this monumental work. Its nearly 30-page bibliography is an invaluable resource all by itself. Still, any atlas is an exercise in emphasis, and opinions may differ as to the balance of content in the Atlas of the Great Plains: gender contrasts (for example in the employment section) would have added significantly to the mix and could have strengthened the population section. Given the length and detail of the narrative section, consideration might have been given to the inclusion of an index.

But these are minor caveats. This matchless work should serve as a textbook for college and university courses on the Great Plains region not only in institutions within the Great Plains but, one hopes, elsewhere in North America as well. It will undoubtedly serve as a template for other projects of this kind elsewhere on the continent. The Acknowledgments section forms a reminder of the numerous contributors and talents required to ensure the success of a massive publishing project of this kind, and I congratulate the University of Nebraska Press not only on its superb production but specifically on its choice of the glossy, opaque paper without which the maps (often on back-to-back pages) could not have looked the way they do.

I only wish I had a copy of this volume that argumentative evening in New York.