A Review of “Hurricanes of the Gulf of Mexico”

Books reviewed:

Bassin, Mark, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840 – 1865

Shortridge, James R., Our Town on the Plains: J. J. Pennell's Photographs of Junction City, Kansas, 1893 – 1922

Jakle, John A. and Sculle, Keith A., Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age

Boeschenstein, Walter, Historic American Towns along the Atlantic Coast

McKee, Jesse O., Ethnicity in Contemporary America: A Geographical Appraisal

Luciuk, Lubomyr Y., Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Ottawa, and the Migration of Memory

Hausladen, Gary, Places for Dead Bodies

Phillips, Richard, Watt, Diane and Shuttleton, David, De-Centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations beyond the Metropolis

Goldin, Liliana R., Identities on the Move, Transnational Processes in North America and the Caribbean Basin

McDonald, David A., On Borders: Perspectives on International Migration in Southern Africa

Fox, Roddy and Rowntree, Kate, The Geography of South Africa in a Changing World

Takeuchi, Keiichi, Modern Japanese Geography: An Intellectual History

Amery, Hussein A., and Wolf, Aaron T., Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace

Karl, Thomas R., Nicholls, Neville and Ghazi, Anver, Weather and Climate Extremes: Changes, Variations, and a Perspective from the Insurance Industry

Pittman, Blair, Texas Caves     

A Review of “An Everyday Geography of the Global South”

Human interactions with the marine environment and pollution hold broad lessons for understanding environmental change. Expanding geographical inquiry beyond its traditional, land-based foci and delving deeper into marine environment and risk issues offers fruitful avenues by which to elaborate and refine our understanding of nature-society relationships. I present a case study of marine petroleum transportation risks in the Straits of Malacca to illustrate the complex history of political and economic processes across a range of scales and shaping the risks in the Straits. The inescapable tension between generalizing global social and environmental processes and recognizing the array of local differences drives ongoing policy debates in the Straits, as it does increasingly for many global environmental problems.     

A Review of “Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South”

Research on small cities has begun to attract the attention of scholars who argue that contemporary urban scholarship, in its preoccupation with the largest and most advanced world-class cities, have largely ignored small to medium-sized cities. In China, although much attention has been paid to economically advanced urban centers, there actually has been a steady stream of work on small cities. This article profiles how a comparatively smaller city in western China attempts to market itself by selectively placing itself within various social–spatial and political–economic realities. Through Jinghong, we illustrate how local officials and planners attempt to center the city as a gateway to Southeast Asia. By activating, often discursively, multiscalar transborder strategies, local officials in Jinghong not only mobilize ethnic imaginaries, but they also adopt forms of entrepreneurial tactics to promote growth. Developmental strategies of Jinghong not only vacillate between (and draw on) both rural and urban resources; they are furthermore expected to alleviate rural poverty. Through highlighting the agency of small cities like Jinghong in China, this article speaks to the broader developmentalist critique of third- and fourth-world cities as an unfortunate footnote in global urban restructuring, often depicted as places of uniform marginalization and structural irrelevance. Indeed, by focusing on the geography of small cities and giving due attention to their size and proximity to rural spaces, case studies like Jinghong might yet point empathetically to different ways and imperatives of “being urban” where the weight that they carry can also be duly recognized.     

A Review of “Route 66: Iconography of the American Highway”

Loblolly pines in Texas and Louisiana exhibit different reactions to moisture extremes, as indicated by the susceptibility of weakened individuals to attack by southern pine beetles. In Texas, intense insect outbreaks among pines occur during periods of extreme moisture surplus, whereas extreme moisture deficits render the Louisiana pines susceptible to attack. Intraspecies tree reponse to moisture extremes therefore appears to be spatially variable and partially dependent upon the frequency occurrence of severe climatic conditions.     

A Review of “Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice”

Measured by growing student numbers and new programs, master's education is one of the most dynamic areas of U.S. higher education. We focus here on the current state of programs that award the master's as their highest degree, so-called master's only departments, a distinct institutional type in the United States, which has received little research attention. Focusing on sixty-four geography programs, considerable differences are apparent in terms of size (both student and faculty numbers), mission, and curriculum; this includes a number of new programs and hybrid degrees that have recently been developed. The findings raise questions about levels of program staffing, program structure, student recruiting, and overall program quality and viability. Given the changing nature of master's education, further attention should be focused on helping universities create, strengthen, and expand such programs in the future.     

Periglacial geomorphology of the Appalachian highlands and interior highlands south of the glacial border — A review

Many features reported in the Appalachian region have been assigned a paleoperiglacial origin based on field relationships and their similarities with analogs active in present day actuoperiglacial environments. These forms include, but are not limited to, sorted and nonsorted varieties of patterned ground, grèzes litées, block fields, block slopes, and block streams, cryoplanation terraces, and hillslope and river terrace landscapes. Although very small-scale features (generally less than 1 m in plan or section dimension) and some larger forms on steep hillslopes are known to be at least sporadically active today, the large-scale features discussed here are interpreted as either inactive or truly fossil periglacial phenomena. Thus they hav implications for paleoclimatic reconstruction and significance as indicators of relative landscape stability since the time(s) of their development. This paper briefly reviews the historical dimension of early researchs' work, present selected examples of recent results, and gives authors' conclusions.     

A Review of “Putting “America” on the Map: The Story of the Most Important Graphic Document in the History of the United States”

Leinbach, Thomas R. and Brunn, Stanley D. (eds.) Worlds of E-Commerce: Economic, Geographical, and Social Dimensions

Calthorpe, Peter and Fulton, William The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl

Furuseth, Owen J. and Lapping, Mark B. (eds.) Contested Countryside: The Rural-Urban Fringe in North America

Sharp, Joanne P. Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity

Gleeson, Brendan and Low, Nicholas (eds.) Governing for the Environment: Global Problems, Ethics, and Democracy

Isenberg, Andrew The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750 – 1920

Albert, Donald P., Gesler, Wilbert M. and Levergood, Barbara (eds.) Spatial Analysis, GIS, and Remote Sensing Applications in the Health Sciences

Wright, Dawn J. and Bartlett, Darius J. (eds.) Marine and Coastal Geographical Information Systems

Jankowski, Piotr and Nyerges, Timothy Geographic Information Systems for Group Decision Making: Towards a Participatory Geographic Information Science

Gerber, Rod and Chuan, Goh Kim (eds.) Fieldwork in Geography: Reflections, Perspectives, and Actions

Craige, Betty Jean Eugene Odom: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist

Lowenthal, David George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation

Schroeder, Richard Shady Practices: Agroforestry and Gender Practices in The Gambia

Lovell, W. George A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala

Lichtenberger, Elisabeth Austria: Society and Regions     

A new map of the Mitdluagkat glacier—a preliminary report

Hasholt, Bent: A new map of the Mitdluagkat glacier—a preliminary report. Geografisk Tidsskrift 87: 19–21, Copenhagen June 1987.

A new map covering the whole Mitdluagkat Glacier has been elaborated. The map is based on air photos from Geodetic Institute in scale 1:150,000 taken July 30, 1981. The scale of the new map is 1:20,000 with 10-m contour intervals. Preliminary field tests indicate that the map is so accurate that it might be used for comparative studies of long-term variations in mass balance of the glacier.     

“A Mirror and a Lamp”: The Role of Power in the Rural Landscape Trajectory of the Ovens Region of Australia

Power relationships structure discourse and its influence on policy and rural land use planning, but little research has examined how this might be observed in the dynamics of rural landscape transition. In a qualitative case study of the Ovens catchment, Victoria, Australia, discursive power is observed through sites of tension between informant interpretations of past, present, and future landscapes and contemporary local decision making. Three main tensions and an observation emerged that suggest discourse and power can be observed through the transfer and support of social memory narratives. We conclude that the identification of tensions between stakeholder perceptions of the past, present, and future of their landscape; awareness of the influence of those interpretations on current decision making; and attention to social memory narratives can provide invaluable insights for those seeking to understand local relationships of power.     

Emulating The Celtic Tiger? A Comparison of the Software Industries of Singapore and Ireland

This article explores parallels between the economic development strategies of Ireland and Singapore through a study of the software sector. My central argument is that Singapore's embryonic software industry can learn important lessons from Ireland, which now exports over US$6 billion worth of products annually. Ireland's success has been achieved by attracting two forms of export-oriented foreign direct investment that are increasingly important due to globalisation trends in the software industry: software development centres, and software product manufacturing and localisation (translation and local adaptation) plants. Ireland has benefited from its position on the periphery of Western Europe, one of the largest software markets in the world, to emerge as a key production location for US transnational corporations. Singapore is perhaps now poised, with a similar range of financial, labour market and infrastructural attributes as Ireland, to benefit from rapid growth in the Asia-Pacific software market. Three corporate case studies from Singapore are used to illustrate this argument.     

Ecological Sensitivity Assessment of the Southeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau using GIS and AHP—A Case Study of the Nyingchi Region

This paper took the Nyingchi area in southeastern Tibet Autonomous Region of China as the research area, and selected five indicators of elevation, slope, slope direction, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and water body as the evaluation system based on the current situation of domestic and foreign research and field investigation. The indicators were analyzed by the AHP method for weighting, and then an ArcGIS overlay analysis was applied. The results show that the ecological sensitivity of the Nyingchi region is generally increasing from the south of Nyingchi to the north of Nyingchi. The northern, western and southwestern parts of Nyingchi are extremely sensitive or highly sensitive, while the southern part is mostly insensitive or mildly sensitive ecologically. The proportions of areas for each sensitivity level are: not sensitive 54.81%, light sensitive 11.97%, moderately sensitive 10.34%, highly sensitive 8.65%, and extremely sensitive 14.23%. The results indicate that the overall ecological sensitivity of the Nyingchi region is low and this region is performing well with respect to ecological environmental protection. This study can provide some suggestions for targeted improvements of the ecological environmental protection in the Nyingchi region and even in the Tibetan Plateau region.     

A Queer Country? A case study of the politics of gay/lesbian belonging in an Australian country town

The present paper examines the complex politics of gay/lesbian belonging through a case study of Daylesford, Victoria, an Australian country town. It contributes to two research bodies: gay/lesbian rural geographies and the politics of belonging. Daylesford hosts ChillOut, Australia's largest rural gay/lesbian festival, which provides a telling context for investigating gay/lesbian belonging in rural Australia. We use qualitative data from the 2006 ChillOut Festival, including interviews with local residents, newspaper commentaries, and visitors’ surveys, to explore how Daylesford has been constructed, imagined, and experienced as a ‘unique’ site of gay/lesbian belonging in rural Australia. We find that ChillOut crucially contributes to its wider reputation as a gay-friendly country town, but also, we argue, to the contested nature of gay/lesbian belonging. This was most powerfully demonstrated by the local council's refusal to fly the gay-identified rainbow flag on the Town Hall during the 2006 Festival and its subsequent banning of the display of all festival flags from that key public building. Because ChillOut was the catalyst for this protocol, the resolution was viewed as homophobic. Indeed, the homophobic and heterosexist rhetoric that ensued in the Letters to the Editor section of the local newspaper revealed some residents’ underlying antagonism towards ChillOut and the local gay/lesbian community. Moreover, appealing to a shared ‘Australian identity’ and associated normative ‘family values’, these letter writers deployed a multi-scalar politics of belonging, where a sense of gay/lesbian belonging to Daylesford at the local scale was contested by the assertion of a ‘more meaningful’ national scale of allegiance fashioned by heteronormativity.     

A Review of “The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World”

In contrast to the conventional gravity model that estimates flows between cities of given sizes, the reverse gravity model attempts to reconstruct the theoretical gravitational attractions of cities from network flow data. This article introduces the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method in solving the reverse gravity model. With comparison to the linear programming (LP) and the simplified algebraic method (SAM), the advantages of the PSO method include flexibility in the impedance function and better goodness of fit. The method is applied to the case study of air passenger transport in China. The results indicate that estimated nodal attractions in cities are generally in line with their population sizes, but there are significant discrepancies between them. A close examination of the discrepancies reveals that a better developed tertiary sector and higher tourism revenue per capita are associated with overestimated attractions in air transport, and stronger railway dominance influences their underestimation. The changes of gravitational attractions in major cities from 2001 to 2008 indicate the declining dominance of the largest cities and a move toward a more balanced development in the air transport system of China.