The full title is Prisoners of Geography: Ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics, and I can’t believe I only got around to read this great book now. Although I wouldn’t describe it as a summer read, I enjoyed reading it out in the sun on a long weekend off recently.
📷: Goodreads
I couldn’t exactly tell what I’ve expected from this book, but it sure exceeded my expectations in many different ways. It is almost like academic writing in a journalistic style, reciting history and stories of world affairs about how much geography matters in everything from the development of a country through world economy to diplomatic relations. It brings the problems of faraway lands closer to your understanding and makes it easy to see how “geo” in geo-politics determines the rise or fall of nation states, regions and indeed, even whole continents.
This edition of the book’s been published in 2016, and obviously a lot has happened since then on the world stage, yet it doesn’t feel dated at all. On the contrary, it gives you all these “I see” moments, helping to put everything else you know about given subject into context.
Even though I am relatively well-informed about this topic, the book connected quite a few dots for me as well. It is fascinating to see how a mild bilateral dispute thousands of miles away on the open sea can affect my life in my small Budapest apartment (think natural gas). Butterfly’s wings to hurricane kind of stuff, just from a more palpable perspective.
I hope you will check out the book, it is very readable, even my friends who are generally not into geo-politics loved it. And I seriously think it is an important read these days, helping you stay informed about the world around you.
Did you read it? Let me know what you thought in the comments. If you haven’t yet, get your copy now, you won’t regret it!
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