Book Review: Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I really liked this at the beginning.

He does a fine job with so many of the first chapters (through Western Europe) and showing the geography as being so integral to a culture and a people and then the choices they make out of those circumstances.

But as he delves further and further into other parts of the world, I think he focuses more on the politics and economics than the geo- parts. My biggest beef is that by losing the geo-cultural discussion and focusing on the geo-economics and geo-politics, it becomes very dated very quickly. Already the Russia/Ukraine and Central America discussions (in particular) are hugely out of date and 2014 seems so very long ago.

Still a worthwhile read, perhaps a living book for a little bit longer for high school students in CM homeschools, but there will have to be a lot of mental digging to see the underlying threads beneath the millions (billions) of dollars of such-and-so and the reasons for positional maneuvering between nations.



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