Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, Volume 30

Description

The thirtieth volume of Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies adds significantly to the corpus of scholarship on geography's multiple histories and biographies with nine essays on figures from Britain, France, the USA and Spain. Each was distinguished in his or her own scholarship and made distinctive contributions in specific fields -- as historical, political or population geographers, and, in one case, as a hydrologist-geomorphologist. The subjects also shared a commitment to the educational benefits of geography and of geographical research that was rooted in a vision of geography as socially illuminating and individually life-changing. Here is further rich testimony of the importance of geographers' lives to the lived experience of geography in practice.

Hayden Lorimer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Charles W.J. Withers is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Edinburgh.

While seeking out a particular entry is the most obvious way to use these reference volumes, one of the first rewards of working through a complete volume is encountering the editors' introduction. It would be quite understandable, given the labour that must be involved in preparing the essays for print, if the volumes were introduced by a very brief preface. Instead, each begins with a substantial and stimulating prolegomenon. These add significant value and help to make the volumes much more than the sum of their biographical parts...The essays that follow...are all superbly executed. -- Diarmid A. Finnegan, Queen's University, Belfast, UK * Journal of Historical Geography *