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J Agric Environ Ethics (2009) 22:487488 DOI 10.1007/s10806-009-9166-5
BOOK REVIEW
Accepted: 23 February 2009 / Published online: 12 April 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Thomas Rumney has produced an impressively complete bibliography of world agricultural geography, a task that would appear not to have been done before, and one that will undoubtedly prove useful to students and scholars for many years to come. Although its hard not to wonder if a book like this would not be even handierat least for some users in electronic form, its hard-copy version will be an important addition for libraries and reference collections across the social sciences.
The book is arranged geographically, appropriately enough, and is divided into nine parts: (1) General and Theoretical Works; (2) North America; (3) Latin America; (4) Europe; (5) Russia, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and the Southern Fringe; (6) Southwest Asia and North Africa; (7) Africa South of the Sahara; (8) Asia; and (9) Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacic Basin. If some of these broad divisions seem somewhat unusual, they have evidently not been contrived in order to equalize the size of each grouping: Southwest Asia and North Africa get 32 pages of entries, for instance, while Sub-Saharan Africa gets 64 pages, Russia and its neighbors get 18 pages and (the rest of) Asia gets 124. They do, however, have the advantage of forming relatively cohesive bio-, or perhaps more properly agro-geographical units.
Further geographical divisions are made within each part (in this case relying on political boundaries); for each country...