The Power of Geography

Any self-respecting geography nerd is constantly on the lookout for new bits of trivia to learn about this spinning rock we all live on. I went into this expecting a refresher on stuff I mostly already knew, but there are some niche geographic insights here that tend to get glossed over in other macrohistories.

Poor old South America (and really the entire Western Hemisphere) gets ignored again and besides brief detours to Australia and low Earth orbit, there's a strong Afro-Eurasian bias for which countries were given chapters. But that landmass is more than half of all the land on Earth, so maybe that's fair. Each chapter is a mix of what makes that region geographically distinct and how that shaped its history up through post-COVID years, but despite the overall title of the book there wasn't much theorizing about what the future might look like. Maybe the author was playing their cards close to the chest, but I don't mind the occasional geopolitical fanfiction that near-future predictions often come across as.

Still, the guy clearly knows his stuff and it looks likely that other regions that felt conspicuously absent from this book (East Asia, Panama, Singapore) are probably already discussed in his other books, which I wouldn't be opposed to seeking out when I get the chance.