Now there are 34 million people living there. Its population then was about two million, and most of them were nomads. What a complicated and confusing history! Saudi Arabia was created in the twentieth century. Apparently it was not until 1935 that the land of Persia became known as Iran but everyone I’ve met from Iran (and all of them were born decades after the name change) describe themselves as Persian. I know a little bit about Iran from teaching ESL to a couple who left that country and resettled here. He also knows where the Sahel is, which shouldn’t have surprised me – he has a mind like a steel trap on more modern history. I learned that Australia, along with New Zealand, the USA, the UK and Canada is a member of what is probably the world’s most efficient intelligence-gathering network: ‘Five Eyes.’ I asked my husband if he knew about this and he did. He suggests the different perspective to be had from the use of a Waterman map, noting the fact that Beijing is as close to Warsaw as it is to Canberra but it is China that is regarded as our close neighbour. We tend to think of China and Australia being relatively close to each other but Tim Marshall points out that the map most of us use, the Mercator, distorts our view of the world. In spite of the sense of overwhelm at times (I’m thinking of you, Saudia Arabia), The Power of Geography is an interesting and informative book. There are some chapters where this wasn’t the case – Turkey and Ethiopia, for instance, which were more compact. There’s a lot of ground to cover and I think that’s the reason I found this book generally wasn’t as tightly written as the previous one. The Power Of Geography covers some very diverse countries with complicated histories – a whole book could be written about just Iran alone when you consider the upheaval and changes there even in recent times. These regions are: Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, The United Kingdom, Greece, Turkey, The Sahel (a region I was totally ignorant of), Ethiopia, Spain and Space. In this new book he explores ten different regions and the power they hold in the shaping of our future. In that book Tim Marshall focused on the fact that geography has played a major role in history. The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World was published this year (2021) and is a sequel to Prisoners of Geography which I wrote about here.
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