Synopses & Reviews
This economical workbook offers more than information for describing and memorizing countries and capitals. The information presented in this study guide helps you identify and connect places not only by location but also by history, economics, and politics. The goal of this course book is to help you acquire a fundamental familiarity with the planet earth. This is an all-in-one resource for gaining key textual information from the core text with hands-on activities and questions for fully understanding and retaining information about world regional geography. Study questions and other activities are found throughout the text.
Synopsis
Places of the World is the only place-name geography book on the market that systematically identifies, maps, and describes each and every one of the world's 193 independent countries. With an organization that parallels Hobbs and Salter's text, this unique workbook provides students with organized practice for matching the names of places with their physical location on a map. The new Fifth Edition is thoroughly updated and includes more than 300 maps--200 new. A consistent framework, summarized by the acronym PLACES (Population, Language, Area, Capital, Economy, and Sovereignty), is used throughout.
About the Author
Joseph J. Hobbs received his B.A. at the University of California Santa Cruz in 1978 and his M.A and Ph.D. at the University of Texas-Austin in 1980 and 1986. He is a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a geographer of the Middle East with many years of field research on biogeography and Bedouin peoples in the deserts of Egypt. Hobbs's interests in the region grew from a boyhood lived in Saudi Arabia and India. His research in Egypt has been supported by Fulbright fellowships, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration. He served as the team leader of the Bedouin Support Program, a component of the St. Katherine National Park project in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. His current research interests are indigenous peoples participation in protected areas in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central America; human uses of caves worldwide; and the global narcotics trade. He is the author of BEDOUIN LIFE IN THE EGYPTIAN WILDERNESS and MOUNT SINAI (both University of Texas Press), co-author of THE BIRDS OF EGYPT (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of DANGEROUS HARVEST: DRUG PLANTS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF INDIGENOUS LANDSCAPES (Oxford). He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in world regional geography, environmental geography, the geography of the Middle East, the geography of caves, the geography of global current events, the geographies of drugs and terrorism, and a field course on the ancient Maya geography of Belize. He has received the University of Missouri's highest teaching award, the Kemper Fellowship. In summers from 1984 to 1999, he led "adventure travel" tours to remote areas in Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Asia, Europe, and the High Arctic. Hobbs lives in Missouri with his wife Cindy, daughters Katherine and Lily, and an animal menagerie.Christopher "Kit" Salter did his undergraduate work at Oberlin College, with a major in Geography and Geology. He spent three years teaching English at a Chinese university in Taiwan immediately following Oberlin. Graduate work for both the M.A. and the Ph.D. was done at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at UCLA from 1968 to 1987, when he took on fulltime employment with the National Geographic Society in Washington with his wife, Cathy. They were both involved in the Society's campaign to bring geography back into the American school system. Kit has been professor and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Missouri, Columbia since moving to the heartland in 1988. Themes that have made Salter glad he choose geography as a life field include landscape study and interpretation in both domestic and foreign settings; landscape study and literature to show students that geography occurs in all writing, not just in textbooks; and geography education to help learners at all levels see the critical nature of geographic issues. He has written more than 125 articles in various aspects of geography; has traveled to a lot of the places that he writes about in his text; and has been wise enough to have a son who is an architect in Los Angeles; a daughter who is a teacher in San Francisco Bay Area; and a neat wife who is a writer in the heart of the heartland in Breakfast Creek, Missouri.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Objectives and Tools of World Regional Geography. Chapter 2: Physical Processes that Shape World Regions. Chapter 3: Human Processes that Shape World Regions. Chapter 4: A Geographic Profile of Europe. Module 4.1: The European Core. Module 4.2: The European Periphery. Chapter 5: A Geographic Profile of Russia and the Near Abroad. Module 5.1: Fragmentation and Redevelopment in Russia and the Near Abroad. Chapter 6: A Geographic Profile of the Middle East and North Africa. Module 6.1: The Middle East and North Africa: Modern Struggles in an Ancient Land. Chapter 7: A Geographic Profile of Monsoon Asia. Module 7.1: Complex and Populous South Asia. Module 7.2: Southeast Asia: From Subsistence Farming to Semiconductors. Module 7.3: China: The Giant. Module 7.4: Japan and the Koreas: Adversity and Prosperity in the Western Pacific. Chapter 8: A Geographic Profile of Oceania. Module 8.1: Australia and New Zealand: Prosperous and No Longer So Remote. Chapter 9: A Geographic Profile of Sub-Saharan Africa. Module 9.1: The Assets and Afflictions of the Sub-Saharan Countries. Chapter 10: A Geographic Profile of Latin America. Module 10.1: Middle America: Land of the Shaking Earth. Module 10.2: South America: Stirring Giant. Chapter 11: A Geographic Profile of the United States and Canada. Module 11.1: Canada: From Sea to Sea. Module 11.2: The United States: Out of Many, One.