AP Human Geography Summer Reading List 2012-13
Incoming IB Human Geographers, please choose one of the following for you summer reading assignment.
Blij, Harm de. Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism
Over the next half century, the human population, divided by culture and economics and armed with weapons of mass destruction, will expand to nearly 9 billion people. Abrupt climate change may throw the global system into chaos; China will emerge as a superpower; and Islamic terrorism and insurgency will threaten vital American interests. How can we understand these and other global challenges? Harm de Blij has a simple answer: by improving our understanding of the world's geography. In Why Geography Matters, de Blij demonstrates how geography's perspectives yield unique and penetrating insights into the interconnections that mark our shrinking world. Preparing for climate change, averting a cold war with China, defeating terrorism: all of this requires geographic knowledge. De Blij also makes an urgent call to restore geography to America's educational curriculum. He shows how and why the U.S. has become the world's most geographically illiterate society of consequence, and demonstrates the great risk this poses to America's national security. Peppering his writing with anecdotes from his own professional travels, de Blij provides an original treatise that is as engaging as it is eye opening. Casual or professional readers in areas such as education, politics, or national security will find themselves with a stimulating new perspective on geography as it continues to affect our world.
Boo, Katherine. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities. In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel; The Fates of Human Societies
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.
Friedman, Thomas L. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It Can Renew America
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman speaks to America's urgent need for national renewal and explains how a green revolution can bring about both a sustainable environment and a sustainable America. Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the expansion of the world’s middle class through globalization have produced a dangerously unstable planet--one that is "hot, flat, and crowded."
Royte, Elizabeth. Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash
Like the bestselling Fast Food Nation, Garbage Land lifts the lid off a world we take for granted, revealing its complicated, surprising underbelly. In this highly unconventional travel book, Elizabeth Royte leads the reader on a cultural tour guided and informed by the things she throws away. Structured around four separate journeys--those of Royte’s household trash, compostable matter, recyclables, and sewage--GARBAGE LAND is a literary investigation of the truly dirty side of consumption. Royte melds science, anthropology, and a strong dose of clear-headed analysis in her appraisal of America’s relationship with its garbage, examining the uncomfortable subject of waste in much the same way Mary Roach’s Stiff tackled corpses. By showing us what really happens to the things we’ve "disposed of," Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact--and that, like it or not, the garbage we create will always be with us.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French-fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.
Timmerman, Kelsey. Where am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make Our Clothes
When journalist and traveler Kelsey Timmerman wanted to know where his clothes came from and who made them, he began a journey that would take him from Honduras to Bangladesh to Cambodia to China and back again. Where Am I Wearing? intimately describes the connection between impoverished garment workers' standards of living and the all-American material lifestyle. By introducing readers to the human element of globalization—the factory workers, their names, their families, and their way of life—Where Am I Wearing bridges the gap between global producers and consumers.
Book Review Format
Reviews should be word-processed, double-spaced, one-inch margins, 12 font, Times New Roman, and 4-6 pages in length.
I. Description/Summary
a. Identify author, title, publisher, place published, and date.
b. Identify main idea and summarize important points.
II. Analysis
a. Author’s purpose – What is the author trying to tell his/her readers?
b. Evidence – What evidence does the author use to support his/her thesis?
c. Example – Provide two passages from the book as evidence of the author’s main idea and purpose and explain why they reflect each.
III. Geography Themes
a. Identify examples of the five themes of geography (location, place, human/environmental interaction, movement and region) that are present in the book. Do an Internet search to understand the five themes. (There is an excellent video on YouTube that explain these themes.)
IV. Evaluation
a. Did you like the book? Why or why not?
b. What are some possible flaws with the author’s position? Give examples and explain why.
c. How might the book have been more informative?
Grading Rubric
_____ Description/Summary (25)
_____ Analysis (author’s purpose, evidence, examples) (30)
_____ Geography Themes (20)
_____ Appraisal (likability, flaws, examples) (15)
_____ Writing Conventions (formatting, spelling grammar, punctuation) (10)
