New Books In Geography

Israel has one of the most extensive and highly developed hiking trail systems of any country in the world. Millions of hikers use the trails every year during holiday breaks, on mandatory school trips, and for recreational hikes.  Shay Rabineau's Walking the Land: A History of Israeli Hiking Trails (Indiana UP, 2023) offers the first scholarly exploration of this unique trail system. Featuring more than ten thousand kilometers of trails, marked with hundreds of thousands of colored blazes, the trail system crisscrosses Israeli-controlled territory, from the country's farthest borders to its densest metropolitan areas. The thousand-kilometer Israel National Trail crosses the country from north to south. Hiking, trails, and the ubiquitous three-striped trail blazes appear everywhere in Israeli popular culture; they are the subjects of news articles, radio programs, television shows, best-selling novels, government debates, and even national security speeches. Yet the trail system is almost completely unknown t

Deepening inequalities and wider processes of demographic, economic, and social change are altering how people across the Global North move between homes and neighbourhoods over the lifespan. Housing and Life Course Dynamics: Changing Lives, Places, and Inequalities (Policy Press, 2023) presents a life course framework for understanding how the changing dynamics of people's family, education, employment, and health experiences are deeply intertwined with ongoing shifts in housing behaviour and residential pathways. Particular attention is paid to how these processes help to drive uneven patterns of population change within and across neighbourhoods and localities. Integrating the latest research from multiple disciplines, the author shows how housing and life course dynamics are together reshaping 21st-century inequalities in ways that demand greater attention from scholars and public policy makers. Rory Coulter is a specialist in the socio-spatial dynamics of cities, with a particular focus on issues of ineq

Maps are essential tools in finding our way around, but they also tell stories and are great depositories of information. Until the twentieth century and the arrival of aerial images, a map was the best way of getting a sense of what a city looked like on the ground. Dublin: Mapping the City (Birlinn, 2023) by Dr. Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson presents a carefully chosen selection of maps that traces the growth and development of Dublin from the early seventeenth century to the present day, offering a fascinating snap-shot of how the city has changed over time. Whilst the maps recount the big stories – the impact of major forces such as the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 or the effects of the Easter Rising in 1916 and the Civil War in 1922 – they also tell the smaller tales such as the creation of a colony of Irish speakers in the late 1920s and the arrival of parking meters and how they changed how people could use the city centre. Together with maps that reveal much about the famous buildings, transpo

Frames That Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps (Brill, 2023) is the first systematic exploration of cartographic cartouches, the decorated frames that surround the title, or other text or imagery, on historic maps. It addresses the history of their development, the sources cartographers used in creating them, and the political, economic, historical, and philosophical messages their symbols convey. Cartouches are the most visually appealing parts of maps, and also spaces where the cartographer uses decoration to express his or her interests--so they are key to interpreting maps. The book discusses thirty-three cartouches in detail, which range from 1569 to 1821, and were chosen for the richness of their imagery. The book will open your eyes to a new way of looking at maps. Open Access link to the book. Chet Van Duzer is an historian and project manager for the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi

Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles (U California Press, 2023) portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Building on extensive ethnographic research, Özge Yaka develops a body-centered, phenomenological approach to women's environmental activism and combines it with a relational ontological perspective. In this way, the book pushes beyond the "natural resources" frame to demonstrate how our corporeal connection to nonhuman entities is constitutive of our more-than-human lifeworld. Fighting for the River takes the human body as a starting point to explore the connection between lived experience and nonhuman environments, treating bodily senses and affects as the media of more-than-human connectivity and political agency. Analyzing local environmental struggles as struggles for coexistence, Yaka frames huma

National Parks are sites where politics, cultures, and ecology converge. University of Northern Colorado historian Michael Welsh argues that, at Big Bend National Park in West Texas, a fourth dynamic is at play: diplomacy. In Big Bend National Park: Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem (U Nevada Press, 2021), Welsh tells the story of how this place - isolated even in its Indigenous history - came to be a site of diplomatic wrangling between the United States and Mexico. Situated along the border of the two nations, Big Bend has been a prism through which both Americans and Mexicans have seen the relationship between their two nations. Big Bend's story thus is one of colonization, conservation and changing American ideas about wilderness, but also about international diplomacy, war, and peace. Big Bend has been many things to many people, and as Welsh argues, few National Park sites have the same dramatic and complex history as this arid range of Texas mountains along the Rio Grande. Dr. Step

The first book-length scholarly treatment of Germany's largest conservation project, the Green Belt, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation along the Former Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) by Dr. Sonja Pieck presents a new interdisciplinary approach: that effective restoration and conservation of wounded land must merge ecology with memory. Since the Cold War's end in 1989, German conservationists have transformed the once-militarised border between East and West Germany into an extensive protected area. Yet as forests, meadows, and wetlands replace fences, minefields, and guard towers, ecological recovery must reckon with the pain of the borderlands' brutal past. The lessons gained by conservationists here, Pieck argues, have profound practical and ethical implications far beyond Germany. Can conservation help heal both ecological and societal wounds? How might conservation honor difficult socioecological pasts? Deeply researched and evocatively written, this beautiful, interdisciplinary investiga

COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World (Ubiquity Press, 2021) brings together an ensemble of social scientists who offer critical reflections on how the pandemic was experienced in the region. It interrogates dominants narratives of Covid-19’s legacies and invites readers to reflect of what it means to return to ‘normal’ in contexts marked by inequalities, selective policy interventions, and invisibilised experiences of marginalised communities. The book is structured around three themes: (1) urbanisation, digital infrastructures, economies, and the environment; (2) migrants, (im)mobilities, and borders; and (3) collective action, communities, and mutual action. Each chapter offers a distinctive point of view that contribute to a wider project of decolonising knowledge production. Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. Murray Mckenzie is a postdoctoral re

Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. James J. A. Blair probes the historical roots and current predicaments of a twenty-first century settler colony seeking to control an uncertain future through resource management and environmental science. Four decades after a violent 1982 war between the United Kingdom and Argentina reestablished British authority over the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas in Spanish), a commercial fishing boom and offshore oil discoveries have intensified the sovereignty dispute over the South Atlantic archipelago. Scholarly literature on the South Atlantic focuses primarily on military history of the 1982 conflict. However, contested claims over natural resources have now made this disputed territory a critical site for examining the wider relationship between imperial sovereignty and environmental governance. Dr. Blair argues that by claiming self-determination and consenting to British so

For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad.  In Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul (University of California Press, 2023), Timur Hammond argues here, however, that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more. Following practices of storytelling and building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Placing Islam shows how different individuals and groups articulated connections among people, places, traditions, and histories to make a place that is paradoxically defined by both powerful continuities and dynamic relationships to the city and wider world. This book provides a rich account of urban religion in Istanbul, offering a key opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond. Reub

Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil's popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Jamie L. Jones uses literary and cultural history to show how the whaling industry held firm in US popular culture even as it slid into obsolescence. Jones shows just how instrumental whaling was to the very idea of "energy" in American culture and how it came to mean a fusion of labor, production, and the circulation of power.  In Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling (UNC Press, 2023), she argues that dying industries exert real force on environmental perceptions and cultural imaginations. Analyzing a vast archive that includes novels, periodicals, artifacts from whaling ships, tourist attractions, and even whale carcasses, Jones explores

Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care (U California Press, 2023) moves beyond "hot take" or strawman fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing, Pezzullo engages public controversies, policies, and headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the US, and Vietnam through hashtag activism, campaign materials, and her podcast, Communicating Care. She argues that plastics have become an entry point into contested environmental politics, including carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Straw Men shares how unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex are

In A Book of Waves (Duke UP, 2023), Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves’ materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. For researchers and their publics, the meanings of waves also reflect visions of the ocean as an environmental infrastructure fundamental to trade, travel, warfare, humanitarian rescue, recreation, and managing sea level rise. Interleaving ethnographic chapters with reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, cosmology, and more, Helmreich demonstrates how waves mark out the wa

Dženita Karić's new book Bosnian Hajj Literature: Multiple Paths to the Holy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) maps the diverse understandings of the hajj in relation to Islamic geography by Bosnian Muslim authors who wrote in different genres from the 16th to the 21st centuries. The study captures how hajj was imagined and constructed in relation to Islamic cosmology, rituals, Sufi saints, and political and temporal realities, while remaining unchanged in other ways. The book generatively theorizes geographies in relation to mobilities but also in relation to emotion, body, and embodiment, materiality, and the sacred. The book will be of interest to scholars of Bosnian studies, Islamic studies, and especially pilgrimage and ritual studies.  Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn mo

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.  Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Conor Harrison, Associate Professor of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina, talks about his research into the racist development of electrical systems in the Jim Crow South with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The pair discuss how Harrison’s research fits within larger trends in the academic discipline of geography and the kinds of empirical research Harrison did to support his articles on the racial dimensions of electricity infrastructure. They also discuss how Harrison’s research has shifted in recent years to focus on the financial structures of the electricity industry. Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins Universit

Our world has innumerable boundaries, ranging from the obvious - like an ocean - to subtle differences in language or climate. Most of us cross invisible lines all the time, but don't stop to consider them. In Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World (Profile, 2023), geographer Dr. Maxim Samson presents 30 such unseen boundaries, intriguing and unexpected examples of the myriad ways in which we collectively engage with and experience the world. From football fans in Buenos Aires to air quality in China, Paris' banlieues to sub-Saharan Africa's Malaria Belt, the existence - or perceived existence - of dividing lines has manifold implications for people, wildlife, and places. Fully illustrated with maps of each location, Invisible Lines reveals the extraordinary ways in which we try to render the planet more liveable and legible; a compelling guide to seeing and understanding our world in all its consistency - and all its messiness, too. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher who

Industrial toxic emissions on the South Baltimore Peninsula are among the highest in the nation. Because of the concentration of factories and other chemical industries in their neighborhoods, residents face elevated rates of lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses in addition to heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular disease, all of which can lead to premature death.  Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore (U California Press, 2022) follows a dynamic and creative group of high school students who decided to fight back against the race- and class-based health disparities and inequality in their city. For more than a decade, student organizers stood up to unequal land use practices and the proposed construction of an incinerator and instead initiated new waste management strategies. As a Baltimore resident and activist-scholar, Nicole Fabricant documents how these young organizers came to envision, design, and create a more just and sustainable Baltimore. Learn

The town of Longyearbyen in the high Arctic is the world's northernmost settlement. Here, climate change is happening fast. It is clearly seen and sensed by the locals; with higher temperatures, more rain and permafrost thaw. At the same time, the town is shifting from state-controlled coal production to tourism, research, and development, rapidly globalizing, with numerous languages spoken, cruise ships sounding the horn in the harbor, and planes landing and taking off. Zdenka Sokolíčková lived here between 2019-2021, and her research in the community uncovered a story about the conflict between sustainability and the driving forces of politics and economy in the rich global North. A small town of 2,400 inhabitants at 78 degrees latitude north on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, Longyearbyen provided a unique view into the unmistakable relationship between global capitalism and climate change.  The Paradox of Svalbard: Climate Change and Globalisation in the Arctic (Pluto Press, 2023) looks at both loc

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.  Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.  This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for fa