geography 1

Geography 1

Manhattan Island Under English Rule The American War of Independence My Way to School Back to New York The Beginnings of Paris The Story of the Earth The Planets How the World is Changing Shape Rocks and Fossils The Seas How the Sea Shapes the Land The Nature Trail Way of Insect Watching What is Prehistory?

Like the History book, at first I thought this book was irredeemably dull and hadn’t intended to include it on the site. But it grew on me, if only as an example of what our schoolbooks were “supposed” to look like, in contrast with the English and Topic books I regularly burned through and defaced. But unlike Topic 1, which exhaustively covers one single subject, or History 1, which manages to remain consistently neat and tidy and makes several valiant attempts to cover entire historical subjects from beginning to end (including the whole of the Stone Age and the entirety of Napoleon’s life), this book is a mess, which never settles on an approach or even any consistent grasp of what Geography actually is. It starts pretty much like those other books, with some stuff about the past copied out of another book. It’s about a place, but it’s definitely the sort of thing I’d file as History rather than Geography, focusing on the political history of New York and how it was gradually invaded by European settlers. Then suddenly there’s a bit about the geography of Fairburn and the route I take to school, before the whole thing lurches into much grander geological stuff about the history of the Earth and the formation of land and sea. Then, just when it seems I’ve finally worked out what Geography might actually be about, there’s a whole bunch of stuff about insects. Which is Zoology, surely? Maybe Biology if you like. But maybe that really sums up Geography as a concept. It’s about towns and cities and the people who live in them, how they came to be the places they are. It’s about orienteering and finding your way around those places. It’s about the world and how those places came to be places at all. And if you really want to cram insects into it, maybe they all come under the umbrella of ‘Nature’. Insects are out there, in Nature, just like Geography is. So it almost - almost - makes sense. But not quite. And it looks rubbish. But excitingly, it’s not the only Geography book I got through in Fairburn, and the other one is even worse.