An Exploration of Geography

• Shell Guide to Reading the Landscape by Richard Muir
  Joseph, 368 pp, £10.50, May 1981, ISBN 0 7181 1971 1
• The Environment in British Prehistory edited by Ian Simmons and Michael Tooley
  Duckworth, 334 pp, £7.95, March 1981, ISBN 0 7156 1441 X
• Geography, Ideology and Social Concern edited by D.R. Stoddart
  Blackwell, 250 pp, £12.00, May 1981, ISBN 0 631 12717 8

For many people, geography remains the story of exploration. But there is more to it than that, as these three books attest. They present the geographer as the student of landscape, as the environmentalist and as the ideologist. Richard Muir looks at the landscape as nature’s stage. Ian Simmons and Michael Tooley, with their team of scientists, identify the stages of nature as they have changed through the successive periods of British prehistory. David Stoddart’s conclave of geographers engage in a philosophical exploration of geography itself.