Human Geography Books - Page 2

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Revised and Updated: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late

Thom Hartmann

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 46 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Everyone Should Read This Book 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book is mind expanding! A very important read for anyone interested in an over arching explanation of the world today and how we got here in terms of the history of civilization. The research is excellent, the book moves logically and smoothly- - I would even call it a page-turner. And I plan to buy a copy for all of my friends! Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

While everything appears to be collapsing around us -- ecodamage, genetic engineering, virulent diseases, the end of cheap oil, water shortages, global famine, wars -- we can still do something about it and create a world that will work for us and for our children’s children. The inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio’s web movie Global Warning, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight details what is happening to our planet, the reasons for our culture’s blind behavior, and how we can fix the problem. Thom Hartmann’s comprehensive book, originally published in 1998, has become one of the fundamental handbooks of the environmental activist movement. Now, with fresh, updated material and a focus on political activism and its effect on corporate behavior, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight helps us understand--and heal--our relationship to the world, to each other, and to our natural resources.

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives

Zbigniew Brzezinski

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Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

As the twentieth century draws to a close, the United States has emerged as the world’s only superpower: no other nation possesses comparable military and economic power or has interests that bestride the globe. Yet the critical question facing America remains unanswered: What should be the nation’s global strategy for maintaining its exceptional position in the world? Zbigniew Brzezinski tackles this question head-on in this incisive and pathbreaking book.The Grand Chessboard presents Brzezinski’s bold and provocative geostrategic vision for American preeminence in the twenty-first century. Central to his analysis is the exercise of power on the Eurasian landmass, which is home to the greatest part of the globe’s population, natural resources, and economic activity. Stretching from Portugal to the Bering Strait, from Lapland to Malaysia, Eurasia is the ”grand chessboard” on which America’s supremacy will be ratified and challenged in the years to come. The task facing the United States, he argues, is to manage the conflicts and relationships in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East so that no rival superpower arises to threaten our interests or our well-being.The heart of The Grand Chessboard is Brzezinski’s analysis of the four critical regions of Eurasia and of the stakes for America in each arena—Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and East Asia. The crucial fault lines may seem familiar, but the implosion of the Soviet Union has created new rivalries and new relationships, and Brzezinski maps out the strategic ramifications of the new geopolitical realities. He explains, for example: Why France and Germany will play pivotal geostrategic roles, whereas Britain and Japan will not. Why NATO expansion offers Russia the chance to undo the mistakes of the past, and why Russia cannot afford to toss this opportunity aside. Why the fate of Ukraine and Azerbaijan are so important to America. Why viewing China as a menace is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why America is not only the first truly global superpower but also the last—and what the implications are for America’s legacy. Brzezinski’s surprising and original conclusions often turn conventional wisdom on its head as he lays the groundwork for a new and compelling vision of America’s vital interests. Once, again, Zbigniew Brzezinski provides our nation with a philosophical and practical guide for maintaining and managing our hard-won global power.

The Control of Nature

John McPhee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Engineering skill, policy blunders: 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Mc Phee presents three well written, beautifully researched case studies, short term marvels of engineering skill and determination, doomed from the outset by humanity's ignorance and disregard of natural processes. This book examines an unstable river system in Southern Louisiana, unpredictable massive lava flows in Iceland, and episodic debris flows in Los Angeles mountain foothills. Each case presents the heroic bad judgement of short-lived humans in conflict with gradual natural processes, catastrophic at long intervals, by human measure, and ultimately inxorable, indifferent long-term to our futile efforts at intervention. He wastes few judgemental words on the human folly his stories chronicle, but lets them speak for themselves. He fills the shoes of both writer and teacher.

Editorial Review:

The Control of Nature is John McPhee's bestselling account of places where people are locked in combat with nature. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strageties and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking is his depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those attempting to wrest control from her - stubborn, sometimes foolhardy, more often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

Book of Peoples of the World: A Guide to Cultures (National Geographic)

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Editorial Review:

As cultures and languages disappear from the Earth at a shocking rate, it becomes all the more urgent for us to know and value the world’s many ethnic identities. National Geographic’s Book of Peoples of the World propels that important quest with concern, authority, and respect. Created by a team of experts, this hands-on resource offers thorough coverage of more than 200 ethnic groups—some as obscure as the Kallawaya of the Peruvian Andes, numbering fewer than 1,000; others as widespread as the Bengalis of India, 172 million strong. We’re swept along on a global tour of beliefs, traditions, and challenges, observing the remarkable diversity of human ways as well as the shared experiences. Spectacular photographs reveal how people define themselves and their worlds. Specially commissioned maps show how human beings have developed culture in response to environment. Thought-provoking text examines not only the societies and the regions that produced them, but also the notion of ethnicity itself—its immense impact on history, the effects of immigration on cultural identity, and the threats facing many groups today. Threading through the story are the extraordinary findings of the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project—a research initiative to catalog DNA from people around the world, decoding the great map of human migration embedded in our own genetic makeup.

At once a comprehensive reference, an appreciation of diversity, and a thoughtful look at our instinct to belong, this uplifting book explores what it means to be human and alive.

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience

Yi-Fu Tuan, Steven Hoelscher

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Geography

On the 25th anniversary of its publication, a new edition of this foundational work on human geography.

In the twenty years since its original publication, Space and Place has not only established the discipline of human geography, but it has proven influential in such diverse fields as theatre, literature, anthropology, psychology, and theology. Eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan considers the ways in which people feel and think about space, how they form attachments to home, neighborhood, and nation, and how feelings about space and place are affected by the sense of time. He suggests that place is security and space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. Whether he is considering sacred versus "biased" space, mythical space and place, time in experiential space, or cultural attachments to space, Tuan's analysis is thoughtful and insightful throughout.

Until retiring in 1998, Yi-Fu Tuan was a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is ranked among the country's most distinguished cultural geographers and has earned numerous honors, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bracken Award for landscape architecture, and an award for meritorious contribution to geography from the Association of American Geographers. He was recently named the Lauréat d'Honneur 2000 of the International Geographers Union. He is the author of many essays and books, including Escapism (1998) and Cosmos and Hearth (Minnesota, 1999).

The Secret Garden (Signet classics)

Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 73 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great version of the story 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I also loved the movie when I was a kid, but back then it was more difficult to get copies of the movie unless you recorded it on your VCR at home when it came on TV.

I enjoy this one much more than the more recently made movie. More drama, more story shared, before, during and after. The characters have much more depth and really shows much more the variation of the changes to each person as Mary changes.

We just watched it yesterday and the music is excellent and the scenery and location was superb. Perhaps not a movies for very young children but any around 10-11 on up could handle the drama of it...

My niece had not seen this version and she liked it much more and was more scared around that big old castle when Mary walked around in it at night searching for the mysterious source of what she heard.

Excellent Traditional Family Entertainment!!! 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Unfortunately, my copy of this title is a VHS Tape print, therefore, my opinion may not carry much influence (?). That being said, I found this to be a very good story produced by one of America's best corporate sponsors of family entertainment!

For those who have enjoyed the work of Irina Brook and Colin Firth for many years look for her and his brief appearance!

The beginning may be a little dark and frightening to very small children, those below the age of 6-8, the film does become much more bright and more up-lifting as the story unfolds.

I recommend this title to all families that worry and are concerned about what their children are learning from todays movie titles and the adult content they are introducing to our young.

Editorial Review:

Enraged at not being invited to the princess's christening, the wicked fairy casts a spell that dooms the princess to sleep for 100 years.

The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape

Harm De Blij

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In recent years a spate of books and articles have argued that the world today is so mobile, so interconnected and so integrated that it is, in one prominent assessment, flat. But as Harm de Blij contends in The Power of Place, geography continues to hold billions of people in an unrelenting grip. We are all born into natural and cultural environments that shape what we become, individually and collectively. From our "mother tongue" to our father's faith, from medical risks to natural hazards, where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming the obstacles in our way.
Incorporating a series of revealing maps, de Blij focuses on the rough terrain of the world's human and environmental geography. The world's continuing partition into core and periphery, and apartheid-like obstructions to migration from the former to the latter, help explain why, in this age of globalization, less than 3 percent of "mobals" live in countries other than where they were born. Maps of language distribution suggest why English, the Latin of the latter day, may become as hybridized as its forerunner. The fateful map of religion casts a shadow of what he calls "endarkenment" over the future of the planet in a time of increasingly destructive weaponry.
De Blij also looks at the ways we are redefining place so as to make its power even more potent than it has been, with troubling implications for the future. Optimistic demographic projections based on declining national populations in the global core are tempered by the prospect that the vast majority of the 3 billion additions to the world's population will burden the periphery. Megacities such as Lagos and Jakarta with their corridors and nodes of globalization foreshadow a future of potentially explosive social contrasts. Subnational entities from southern Sudan to northern Sri Lanka seek independence at a time when the planet's limited living space is already fragmented into 200 states.
Looking down from the business-class compartment of a transcontinental airliner, the world looks a lot flatter than it does from the doorway of a dwelling in a local village. Harm de Blij brings us back to earth to reveal the all-too-rugged contours of place.

Titanic: A Nonfiction Companion to Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Tree House Research Guide)

Mary Pope Osborne

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The best book, by Jacqueline Shaw 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This nonfiction book tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the Titanic. Some of the information the book tells you includes, how they built the ship, the day everyone boarded the ship, the types of people that were on the ship, and finally how the boat sank. I also enjoyed the pictures in the book. Some of the pictures were of the rooms, the details of the ship, and the boiling room. I recommend this book to people who want to learn about the Titanic and are from grades 1 through 5.

This book is a excellent book 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I love this book because it like takes to the plase were they are and it make you want to read the book these book take you on a advender. It makes you like be the characters Jake and anny.

Editorial Review:

How long did it take to build the Titanic? Why did it sink? What was it like to be a passenger? What happened to the people who survived? Find out the answers to these questions and more in Magic Tree House Research Guide: Titanic, Jack and Annie’s very own guide to the ship and its story. Includes information on the people who sailed on the Titanic, life on board the ship, the search for the sunken remains, Titanic artifacts today, and much more!

The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment

Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich

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Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In humanity’s more than 100,000 year history, we have evolved from vulnerable creatures clawing sustenance from Earth to a sophisticated global society manipulating every inch of it. In short, we have become the dominant animal. Why, then, are we creating a world that threatens our own species? What can we do to change the current trajectory toward more climate change, increased famine, and epidemic disease?

 

Renowned Stanford scientists Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich believe that intelligently addressing those questions depends on a clear understanding of how we evolved and how and why we’re changing the planet in ways that darken our descendants’ future. The Dominant Animal arms readers with that knowledge, tracing the interplay between environmental change and genetic and cultural evolution since the dawn of humanity. In lucid and engaging prose, they describe how Homo sapiens adapted to their surroundings, eventually developing the vibrant cultures, vast scientific knowledge, and technological wizardry we know today.

 

But the Ehrlichs also explore the flip side of this triumphant story of innovation and conquest. As we clear forests to raise crops and build cities, lace the continents with highways, and create chemicals never before seen in nature, we may be undermining our own supremacy. The threats of environmental damage are clear from the daily headlines, but the outcome is far from destined. Humanity can again adapt—if we learn from our evolutionary past.

 Those lessons are crystallized in The Dominant Animal. Tackling the fundamental challenge of the human predicament, Paul and Anne Ehrlich offer a vivid and unique exploration of our origins, our evolution, and our future.

A Language Older Than Words

Derrick Jensen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An incredible wake-up call 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I can't think of another book that has affected me as profoundly as this one. It woke me up to the living world, or rather, made me remember what I knew as a child and managed under this coercive culture to forget: that the natural world speaks to us, if only we listen. As we witness the world being murdered before our eyes, we urgently need to learn to listen, before it's too late.

In all of Derrick Jensen's work, he offers brilliant insights about why civilization is killing the planet and what we can and must do about it. Many people have described this book as "heartbreaking," and that's true -- it breaks through the surface of hearts hardened by denial, confronts us with despair, then leads us carefully to the other side of that despair into healing and the possibility of conscious action. It combines investigation and well-reasoned political analysis with an engaging personal style and rare honesty that together offer the reader both intellectual understanding, and just as importantly, a deep emotional comprehension.

After reading this book I immediately bought three copies to give to relatives, in the hope that they would be strengthened by it as I have been, to break the silence, join the world, and stop the horrors.

Editorial Review:

At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older Than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives and indeed affects all aspects of life on Earth. This chronicle of a young man’s drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community and how we can make things better.