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