Journal of Cultural Geography
Book Review Page

Welcome to the book review page for the Journal of Cultural Geography.  Displayed below are the covers, bibliographical information, and a short synopsis for books currently available for review.

Book reviews play a vital role in the exchange of ideas and advancement of knowledge within academia.  They call attention to recently published scholarly work, identify its significance and importance, and warn against possible deficiencies.  Cultural geographers wishing to review one of the following books are encouraged to contact the book review editor identified below.

A complimentary copy of the book is sent to the reviewer with a contract,  instructions, and style sheet.  Reviewers are typically allotted 500 to 600 words with an expected turn-around time of approximately three to four months.


Books Available For Review:

Culture and Society: Critical Essays in Human Geography         (date posted: 8 May 2009)

Edited by Nuala C. Johnson

Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2008.  xxii + 500 pp.,  US$250.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-7546-2691-6

Human geographers have been at the forefront of research that examines the relationships between space, culture and society. This volume contains twenty-one essays, published over the past thirty years, that are iconic instances of this investigative field. With a focus on four broad themes – landscape, identity, colonialism, nature – these essays represent some of the best and most innovative interventions that geographers have made on these topics. From the visual to the corporeal, from rural Ceylon to urban America and from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, this volume brings together a set of theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded works.



The Geography of Cinema - A Cinematic World         (date posted: 8 May 2009)

Edited by Chris Lukinbeal and Stefan Zimmermann

Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH, 2008.  205 pp.,  Euro$39.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-3515-09199-2

This book addresses questions surrounding the constructions of space, culture, society, identity and representation.  The geography of cinema extends beyond the screen, director and audience, to include the wider industrial and political complex of the cultural economy.  In this sense, culture can be viewed as an economic commodity set within the broader frame of globalization and postmodernism.  A cinematic world occupies a territory between our city's streets, the Cineplex, the TV set, and our geographical imagination and identity.  These contexts invite inquiries into the production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption of film as well as global cinema, hapticalities of viewing, critical political economies, and cinematic ethnographies.  This collection of essays provides unique and eclectic insights into the exciting and emerging subfield of film geography. 



Emotion, Place and Culture 
       (date posted: 8 May 2009)

Edited by Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi

Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2009.  xv + 318 pp., US$99.95 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-7546-7246-3

Recent years have witnessed a rapid rise in engagement with emotion and affect across a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, with geographers among others making a significant contribution by examining the emotional intersections between people and places. Building on the achievements of Emotional Geographies (2005), the editors have brought together leading scholars such as Nigel Thrift, Alphonso Lingis and Frances Dyson as well as young, up and coming academics from a diverse range of disciplines to investigate feelings and affect in various spatial and social contexts, environments and landscapes. The book is divided into five sections covering the themes of remembering, understanding, mourning, belonging, and enchanting.


My Kind of County: Door County Wisconsin        (date posted:  8 May 2009)

By  John Fraser Hart

Chicago: University of Chicago Press and The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2008.  xi + 163 pp., US$27.50 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-9300-6686-1

The shores of Door County, Wisconsin have long served as an idyllic retreat for Midwestern families. The regions scenic beauty is augmented by a rich history that reflects the classic American experience and John Fraser Hart now pays homage to the “Cape Cod of the Midwest” in this engaging chronicle.

A renowned scholar and a summer home owner in Door County for over fifty years, Hart possesses intimate knowledge of the physical geography and cultural history of the region. With his incisive geographers eye, he charts the gorgeously sprawling landscape that draws more than two million visitors annually, including the limestone bluffs along Green Bay that loom as high as 200 feet. He also explores Door Countys agricultural heritageincluding the famous cherry orchardsas well as the difference between the Green Bay and Lake Michigan sides of the peninsula, and the quiet interior region. The book then turns to the cultural aspects of the region, examining diverse topics such as the history of the first ethnic European settlers, the tourist economy, and the settlements primarily Belgian architecture.r



Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century American West 
       (date posted: 17 April 2009)

By  Karen M. Morin

Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008.  xii + 278 pp., US$29.95 (hardback), ISBN: 0-8156-6167-7

British explorer and professional travel writer Isabella Bird is, to the modern eye, a study in contradictions. One of the premier mountaineers and world explorers of her generation, she was, in 1892, the first woman elected to London's Royal Geographic Society. And yet Bird's books on her travels are filled with depictions of herself and other women that reinforce the "properly feminine" domestic and behavioral codes of her day.  In this fascinating and highly original collection of essays, Karen Morin explores the self-expression of travel writers like Bird by giving geographic context to their work. With a rare degree of clarity the author examines relationships among nineteenth-century American expansionism, discourses about gender, and writings of women who traveled and lived in the American West in the late nineteenth century -- British travelers, American journalists, a Native American tribal leader, and female naturalists. Drawing from a rich diversity of primary sources, from published travelogues and unpublished archival sources such as letters and diaries to newspaper reportage, Morin considers ways in which women's writing was influenced by the material circumstances of travel in addition to the various social norms that circumscribed female roles. Ranging in scale from the interior of train cars and the homes of these women to the colonial projects of conquering the American West, the author illustrates how geography was fundamental to the formation of women's identity and greatly influenced the gendered and colonialist language found in their writing.



My Kind of Midwest: Omaha to Ohio 
       (date posted: 15 April 2009)

By  John A. Jakle

Chicago: The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2008.  xi + 153 pp., US$27.50 (hardback), ISBN: 1-930-066-87-2

“Will it play in Peoria?” That question—only half-joking—hovers over everything from politics to television, an acknowledgment that the Midwest is perhaps the most emblematic regions of the United States today. Stereotypes both good and bad abound about Midwesterners, but in this incisive yet poignant book, John Jakle reveals a rich and telling portrait of the contemporary Midwest and its people.

In engaging prose, Jakle chronicles his childhood and adult life in the Midwest interwoven with a look at the region’s geographic and cultural history. My Kind of Midwest reveals that the region is more than just a group of “flyover states,” as Jakle tells a engaging narrative that recounts his youthful explorations of the flourishing cities of Detroit and Chicago in the 1940s; the rapid growth and importance of gateway cities such as Omaha, Kansas City, and Cincinnati along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers; and the integral role of tourism to Midwestern states’ economies.

An intimate and compelling narrative of one man’s connection to the American landscape, My Kind of Midwest will be essential reading for all those with ties to the heartland.



Theme Park 
       (date posted: 21 January 2009)

By  Scott A. Lukas

London: Reaktion Books, Ltd, 2008.  i+ 272 pp., US$27.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-186-189-394-9

Theme parks are a uniquely interactive and enduring form of entertainment that have influenced architecture, technology, and culture in surprising ways for more than a century, as Scott Lukas now reveals in his compelling historical chronicle.

Theme Park takes the primitive amusements of pleasure gardens as its starting point and launches from there into a rich, in-depth investigation of the evolution of the theme park over the twentieth century. Lukas examines theme parks in countries around the world—including in the United States, Mexico, Europe, Japan, China, South Africa, and Australia—and how themed fairs and parks developed through diverse means and in a variety of settings. The book examines world-famous and lesser-known parks, including the early parks of Coney Island; Madrid’s Movieworld; a series of World Fairs and their luxurious exhibition halls; Six Flags parks and virtual theme parks today; and, of course, the unparalleled achievements of Disneyland and Disney World.

Lukas analyzes the theme park as a living entity that unexpectedly shapes people, their relationships, and the world around them. Theme parks have now become complex representations of the human mind itself, he contends, through its interpretations of books, feature films, video games, and Web sites. Ultimately, Theme Park reveals, the wider influence of theme parks can be found in the shopping malls, branded stores, and casinos that employ the tricks and techniques of amusement parks to dominate our entertainment world today.
Packed with captivating illustrations, Theme Park takes us on historical roller coaster ride that both reanimates the places that shaped our childhoods and anticipates the future of escapism and fantasy fun.



Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression         (date posted: 28 July 2008)

By  Jani Scandura

Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.  xix + 322 pp., US$24.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8223-3666-2

Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era “dumps,” places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces the concept of “depressive modernity,” an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and progressive modernity—capitalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration—are thrown into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill. Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory, language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place.

An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status as the island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West’s “dump of dreams,” in which the introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present, exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America.



A Theory of Enclaves         (date posted: 28 July 2008)

By  Evgeny Vinokurov

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007.  ix+317 pp., US$80.00 (hardback), ISBN: 0-7391-2403-X

Evgeny Vinokurov is head of the Economic Analysis Unit at the Eurasian Development Bank.  Providing a fully fledged theory of enclaves and exclaves, A Theory of Enclaves covers a wide scope of regions and territories throughout the world, focusing on three facets of enclaves' existence: political, economic, and social.  Rich with maps and illustrations, this book covers 282 enclaves with a combined population of approximately 3 million, and shows the importance of enclaves because of their specific status and the issues they raise for both the mainland and surrounding states.



Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity   (date posted: 16 April 2008)

By Iain Chambers

Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. i+181 pp., US$21.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8223-4150-5

The cultural theorist Iain Chambers is known for his historically grounded, philosophically informed, and politically pointed inquiries into issues of identity, alterity, and migration, and the challenge postcolonial studies poses to conventional Western thought. With Mediterranean Crossings, he challenges insufficient prevailing characterizations of the Mediterranean by offering a vibrant interdisciplinary and intercultural interpretation of the region’s culture and history. The “Mediterranean” as a concept entered the European lexicon only in the early nineteenth century. As an object of study, it is the product of modern geographical, political, and historical classifications. Chambers contends that the region’s fundamentally fluid, hybrid nature has long been obscured by the categories and strictures imposed by European discourse and government.

In evocative and erudite prose, Chambers renders the Mediterranean a mutable space, profoundly marked by the linguistic, literary, culinary, musical, and intellectual dissemination of Arab, Jewish, Turkish, and Latin cultures. He brings to light histories of Mediterranean crossings—of people, goods, melodies, thought—that are rarely part of orthodox understandings. Chambers writes in a style that reflects the fluidity of the exchanges that have formed the region; he segues between major historical events and local daily routines, backwards and forwards in time, and from one part of the Mediterranean to another. A sea of endlessly overlapping cultural and historical currents, the Mediterranean exceeds the immediate constraints of nationalism and inflexible identity. It offers scholars an opportunity to rethink the past and present and to imagine a future beyond the confines of Western humanistic thought.



 



                             Contact Information:

                                                         Jeffrey S. Smith, Ph.D.
                                                         Book Review Editor
                                                         118 Seaton Hall / Geography
                                                         Kansas State University
                                                         Manhattan, KS  66506-2904
                                                         (785) 532-3412
                                                          jssmith7@ksu.edu
 



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Last Updated: 19 June 2009