THE POWER OF GEOGRAPHY: TEN MAPS THAT REVEAL THE FUTURE OF OUR WORLD.

Tim Marshall's book goes a long way to bridging the chasm, although in an informal rather than a scholarly fashion. Whenever the subject is casually invoked there is a great deal of resource determinism, as can be caricatured by the old efforts to account for Lancashire's cotton industry in terms of climate. Where things happen, or as perplexingly where they fail to happen, is Marshall's forte: he stresses the underlying political (and hence economic) influences of landforms and the enormous distances that confront many states with barely soluble problems of irredentism and revanchism. [Extracted from the article]