Have your family been asking what to get you for Christmas? Or just generally curious as to what your lecturer’s think are the top geography-related gifts to give this Christmas? No problem, we’ve got you covered!
Charlotte Lemanski:
My geography-related gift book suggestion is “Invisible Women: exposing data bias in a world designed for men” by Caroline Criado Perez. Not explicitly geography, but thinking about the gender-assumptions in data collection/analysis is a crucial geographical skill (esp for 3rd years analysing dissertation data right now).
And for those looking for a geog-related Christmas gift for a younger sibling/cousin etc., then I highly recommend “The Map colouring book” by Natalie Hughes. Outstanding quality. My sons (aged 8 and 10) love it.
And my final Christmas recommendation is to buy books from https://uk.bookshop.org/ rather than amazon.
Alex Jeffrey:
My Christmas book suggestion is more In the Bleak Midwinter than Jingle Bells: it is Fenland Chronicle by Sybil Marshall. Written in the 1960s the book is divided between the recollections of Marshall’s parents of their childhood growing up in the Fens. It is truly a remarkable work that shines a light on the characters, traditions and conditions of rural Cambridgeshire in the early 20th century, no more than ten miles from where you are studying. From this synopsis it could be dismissed as an account of rural poverty or the ‘backwardness’ of Fens. But while it definitely does bleak, it is so much more: by focusing on childhood the landscape assumes a kind of magic, there is hope that things will improve and the warmth of family and friends is the heart of happiness. Christmas 2020 could do with some of that.
Mia Gray:
My recommended book is Stigma, The Machinery of Inequality, by Imogen Tyler 2020, Zed Books.
This is a great book – both a good read and a well-argued exploration of stigma. Tyler’s book provides an in-depth analysis of historic and contemporary uses of stigma. She examines the ways in which stigma is actively produced and reproduced to exacerbate inequality and injustice.
Tyler’s argument is embedded in analysis of class and race at the centre of understandings of stigma as a classificatory form of power. Also has a cracking chapter on austerity! Worth curling up with on the sofa over the Christmas break.
Sarah Radcliffe:
One of the most fascinating books I’ve read over recent years is Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: the adventures of Alexander von Humboldt (John Murray, 2015). It’s an account of von Humboldt’s journeys to South America and to Siberia in the early nineteenth century, and his contributions to how Europeans understand nature, landscape and environmental change. His accounts of his journeys not only inspired later naturalists and writers and publics, but he criticized earlier European accounts of Indigenous peoples. Wulf’s prize-winning book brings the travels, writings and wider influences to vivid life, and places Humboldt in his historic, geographic and scientific context. To complement this amazing book, two other books remind us that women have travelled and documented and challenged expectations in Latin America.
Robert Whitaker’s book The Mapmaker’s Wife (with the sensationalist subtitle A true tale of love, murder and survival in the Amazon…) tracks how in the late 18th century Isabel Grameson set off to find her French husband who had been involved in a scientific expedition on the shape of the Earth. Isabel took the highly unusual step of setting off towards the Amazon river from the Ecuadorian Andes…. A more popular account than Wulf’s compelling synthesis of history and science, Whitaker’s book draws out the challenges facing non-scientific travel at that time.
Phil Howell:
Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). I am a huge fan of the French literary critic Pierre Bayard, and whilst How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been is not nearly as good as his How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (2007), it’s still huge fun – something in seriously short supply in academic books. It’s also topical, since most of us are temporarily reduced to “armchair travel”. It is fun, but serious fun too: Bayard maintains that distance has its intellectual benefits: to talk about places we have to be at the right distance from them, from what he calls “the ravages of participatory observation”. His point: nontravel is necessary for writing about places. So very French. But true as well as fun.
Francessca Moore:
Joan Didion (2003) Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11 and Joan Didion (2001) Political Fictions. Two must-read books for all Geographers on politics, history and crucially how to analyse ideas- great if you are interested in discourse analysis and the power/knowledge relationship. Also useful if you are interested specifically in American politics.
DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR ONLY AND DO NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OR OPINIONS OF COMPASS MAGAZINE AS A WHOLE OR THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY.