Monday, January 01, 2007

Geography in the Age of Reconnaissance

Sipping a cup of hot coffee in a quiet café while everyone was capering with joy for the first day of 2007, I was reading an unexciting book that my husband recommended. The content of the book was dry, so I could sense I would quit reading as soon as I began. Yet I did not. The Geographical Tradition by David N. Livingstone is a renowned writing on the history and philosophy of geography, and it has become the core textbook in many universities. Having just finished the second chapter, I have already felt that my living is closely related to geography – geography is everything and everywhere. The interesting part of the book in so far is that the author claimed that geography played a leading role in the evolution of the scientific tradition, and its contributions have been to the emergence of modern science. For geography is a practical science, it has resolved a lot of questions by real-world experience.