A Student's Introduction to Geographical Thought: Theories, Philosophies, Methodologies by PaulineCouper, SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, 2015, 280 pp., paper US $47.00 (ISBN 978-1446282960) (original) (raw)

2017, Canadian Geographer

Given that I believe that we are all students for all of our lives, academic and otherwise, the title of the book under review should not be problematic for me. But my first reaction was: "Is this Geographic Thought for Dummies?" I do not think it is. At least, it does not have a yellow and black cover, but the level of the student addressed is of some concern. And, in a recent search on Amazon, there were 1,771 Dummies titles and only one came even close to being "geographic"-on map reading by J. Hill (2014). This book is presumably oriented to senior undergraduates, at least from the comments on the end cover. My view on reading the text is that such persons must be quite advanced in their understanding of not only geography as a discipline, but also of the various philosophical ideas that impinge upon it. In fact, I would think that many students, at whatever level, would gain enormously from the breadth of the coverage of the various issues contained in this book, even though most would have to devote some serious effort in matching the coverage and its level of sophistication. As the author notes: "Students often find studying 'geographic thought' difficult, not least because philosophy and theory are, by definition, rather abstract" (p. 3). In terms of implied objectives, then, the author appears to be attempting to make such study less abstract, less demanding, more. .. user-friendly? At least, that seems to be the tone of the