Human Geography

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history....

Whether ancient, crumbling parchments or generated by Google, maps tell us things we want to know, not only about our current location but about the world in general....

An illuminating history of North America's 11 rival cultural regions that explodes the red state-blue state myth....

In ten chapters and ten maps, Prisoners of Geography looks at the past, present and future to offer an essential insight into one of the major factors that determines world history.

From the author of the New York Times best seller Prisoners of Geography, the highly anticipated follow-up that uses 10 maps of crucial regions around the globe to explain the geopolitical strategies of today’s world powers and what it means for our future....

When we talk about human history, we often focus on great leaders, population forces, and decisive wars. But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming....

In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs.

In today's modern world, we are largely isolated from the kind of savagery our ancestors faced on a daily basis. Although violence was as natural to our evolutionary development as sex and food, it has become foreign to most of us....

To many of us, the Earth's crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated narratives, telling gothic tales of cataclysm and reincarnation....

The Control of Nature is John McPhee's bestselling account of places where people are locked in combat with nature.

American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or street festival the same way again....

From the New York Times bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography and leading geopolitics expert comes an essential book on today’s space race—including the increasingly tense power struggle between the US, China, and Russia and what it means for all of us here on Earth.

Meth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness....

Consuming less is our best strategy for saving the planet - but can we do it? In this thoughtful and surprisingly optimistic book, journalist J. B. MacKinnon investigates how we may achieve a world without shopping....

In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations....

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? How can we come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we've never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted....

Vivid, surprising, and utterly timely, Akiko Busch's How to Disappear explores the idea of invisibility in nature, art, and science, in search of a more joyful and peaceful way of living in today's increasingly surveilled and publicity-obsessed world....

In this insightful travelogue, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and The Revenge of Geography, turns his perceptive eye to a region that for centuries has been a meeting point of cultures, trade, and ideas....

In Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination....

Capitalism examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people....

A sweeping history of cities through the millennia - from Mesopotamia to Manhattan - and how they have propelled Homo sapiens to dominance....

Nomad Century is an urgent investigation of the most underreported, seismic consequence of climate change: how it will force us to change where—and how—we live....

The immersive, captivating untold story of the mass radicalization of the Republican Party in the aftermath of January 6, 2021, entrenching the political power of a radical right-wing fringe dedicated to dismantling democracy itself....

Focusing on the area south of Port Townsend and between the Cascade and Olympic mountains, David Williams uncovers human and natural histories in, on, and around Puget Sound.

A vivid, journalistic account of how climate change will make American life as we know it unfeasible.