Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World

Well, it has been long time since a book made me so disappointed (and at times very angry) as Prisoners of Geography did.

While one may expect from a popular non-fiction book certain degree of simplification, here it is taken to an extreme. Analysis is very shallow, or speaking more precisely, a book is a wild mixture of well-known facts with statements made by an author, without any supporting arguments or numbers provided. Ok, in some cases the author quotes politicians, including Sara Palin and Vladimir Zhirinovskiy. I said so. Point is proven. Facepalm.

I should have stopped at the very beginning, where author writes that Vladimir Putin in his daily prayer to God would ask God to create mountains in Ukraine. But I tried to carry on. And had to read that Putin also thinks of pizza. And China tries to invades Russia by means of Chinese restaurants. And about Turkey feeling satisfied or hopeful (the whole country is feeling, yes)

Given all of this, it is hard to take seriously any of the other statements in the book, except, perhaps, the geographical location of countries or rivers. This part is correct, you know, it is hard to get it wrong.

While the book is informative I found it slightly bias since it seems like it is written from an eurocentric point of view.

It's a very interesting view of the world, at least for someone who doesn't know much about geography and international politics, like me