Play Book Tag discussion

Tim Marshall spent 30 years as a foreign correspondent, and has now turned his experience to writing about the world.

I love non-fiction written by journalists. They bring a great combination of facts and compelling storylines. And this book fits that description perfectly.

In this book, the author describes modern geopolitics through the lens of geography. I tend to think that in our modern interconnected world, things like rivers, coastlines, mountains and borders don't mean as much as they used to. So I was fascinated to reconsider current events in this light.

The book is a bit out of date. Published in 2015, the events that were current at the time feel somewhat like ancient history now. But many of the international issues and tensions are still on-going.

One example is Russia v Ukraine. As this book was published, Russia had just annexed Crimea. The author describes why/how this occurred which was interesting. He also described that Russia could conceivably make a military push to take over all of Ukraine, but that it wouldn't be "worth the headache". Fast forward to today and we see that Russia feels like it's worth the headache after all. I feel like I have a much better understanding of both sides of that conflict now. No change in my belief that Russia is in the wrong, but there's more to the story than we get in the nightly news.

I was also very interested in the author's take on China—why it won't give up on Tibet or Taiwan and why it treats the Uighur population so poorly. There's also an excellent discussion of China's efforts to build infrastructure in Africa and South America. In short, they want both raw materials and expanded markets—both of which feel significantly less threatening than what we're fed by typical media.

Thanks for the review. I have this book on my tbr and it sounds like this is one I should read sooner rather than later.

I really enjoyed this book. I read it when we were locked down for Covid, but I can see how parts of it now would be out of date.

This sounds fascinating. Thanks for the review!