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The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape | 
 enlarge | Author: Harm De Blij
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $16.84
You Save: $11.11 (40%)
New (45) Used (10) from $16.84
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 57617
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 0195367707
Dewey Decimal Number: 304.2
EAN: 9780195367706
ASIN: 0195367707
Publication Date: July 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081130225628T
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Great quality October 6, 2008
C. Reynolds
1 out of 8 found this review helpful
I was extremely pleased with the condition of the book, I'm really glad I ordered off amazon instead of a bookstore, where I probabaly would have paid twice as much for it.
Not a melting pot and the world isn't flat, either. July 14, 2008
Ken M. (NY, NY)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Though the globalization debate has been raging for awhile, this book looks at it from a new perspective: geography. The author persuasively claims that place--physical and cultural geography--imposes severe limits on human thought and action. Lots of maps help make this unique perspective even clearer.
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