Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

About halfway through this book, I theorized that it might have been better as a video course. Geography is, by nature, visual, and there’s just so much information in this it gets harder to figure out where it’s all happening.

Also, the author ventures away from his geographic premise in some places. He drifts into pure politicals and religion and starts talking about things that don’t seem to be geographical in nature. In a way, the book is more about human conflict than anything.

Some chapters are better than others, and the whole is quite good. The 10 maps correspond more or less to the seven continents (minus Australia, for some reason), plus a few breakouts areas in Asia: Russia, China, India/Pakistan, etc.