method but then turns to Japan-bashing, referring to very controversial reports. Japanese sourcesare not used. In contrast, whaling conducted by American Inuit andMakah is positively presented.In the final chapter e ‘Flukes’ e he returns to the somewhat romantic mood of chapter eight.

This romantic mood is perhaps welcome to whale-watchers and many readers in the Anglo-Saxon world. But by ignoring the views of whalers and their friends, the picture is distorted.And by selective readings of evidence, the outcome can be absurd. As when Roman uses theNew Zealand movieWhale Rider from 2002 to argue that Maori attitudes to whales have changedfrom one enjoying stranded whales as food to one of compassion and rescue. He does not men-tion, however, that the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed between representatives of the BritishCrown and the Maori tribes in 1840, enshrines the Maori rights to stranded whales. In order toprotect their rights the Maori have become members of the World Council of Whalers and eveninvited and hosted its third General Assembly held in Nelson in 2000. Despite government threatsthat Maori in public services risked being sacked for attending, more than 100 Maori representa-tives made the General Assembly a success. This is also part of the story, a story that becomes allthe more interesting if it is acknowledged that there is not necessarily any contradiction betweenthe film and the Assembly in the Maori way of thinking. Only when we realize this can we begin topenetrate the great diversity in humanewhale relations. But for whale lovers, this book meetsmost expectations.

Arne KallandUniversity of Oslo, Norway

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2007.01.014

455Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007) 431e462

Cristina D’Allesandro-Scarpari, Geographes en brousse. Un metissage spatial entre discours etpratiques, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005, 376 pages, V31 paperback.

The importance of regional monographs in the production of knowledge by French geographersduring the twentieth century is well known. These volumes, often in excess of 500 pages apiece andcompleted in the ‘mature years’ of the author, were the published output of doctoral theses thatopened the way to university chairs. Usually these monographs were completed for parts of met-ropolitan France, however, the ‘model’ was also exported to la France d’outre-mer where geogra-phers were employed as lycee teachers in Indochina, North Africa and ‘Black Africa’, preparingtheir doctorates on a part-time basis over considerable spans of years. In Geographes en brousse,Cristina D’Allesandro-Scarpari focuses primarily on the writings of French geographers workingin Black Africa from the 1930s through to the 1970s but she also analyses an array of articles byothers who maintained a passing interest in the region but would not label themselves as ‘geogra-phes africanistes’. With a training in philosophy and sociology as well as in geography, and havingfield experience in Guinee and Senegal, Dr. D’Allesandro-Scarpari injects interpretative skillsfrom the social sciences to energize her detailed reading of almost 150 core texts plus a wide rangeof contextual items, and to inform the interviews she conducted with seven senior French geog-raphers, now retired, with lengthy lived experience of Black Africa.

Her study begins with a sympathetic appraisal of the definitions and redefinitions of Frenchgeographical work in Africa, conceived initially as a component of ‘colonial geography’, then

456 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007) 431e462

‘tropical geography’, ‘African geography’, African contributions to ‘development studies’ or‘third world studies’, or geographical contributions to ‘African studies’. These varying terminol-ogies are infused with differing ideological and political meanings that have powerful significancewithin French geography and in the working relationship between geographers and researchers inother, more self-confident, disciplines. Attention is drawn to the formative roles of Jacques Weu-lersse, at the Sorbonne in the late 1930s, and Jacques Richard-Molard, director of the geographydepartment of the Institut Francais d’Afrique Noire in Dakar. Both died young and their contri-bution has been rather overlooked of late. Mirroring the strength of ‘rural geography’ in Franceboth before and after 1945, most African monographs by French geographers concentrated on thecountryside, on farmers, landscapes and agricultural systems. In due course, the study of urbangeography would gain importance but the lag time in Black Africa was even greater than thatapparent in metropolitan France. French geographers acknowledged their debt to some colonialadministrators and foresters, often educated at the Ecole coloniale in Paris where they were thor-oughly trained in geography. The challenge facing ‘geographers in the bush’ was to move beyondthe testimony of oral history and technical reports to produce works of science. These embracedevidence from air photographs, official surveys (often far from accurate) and the field observa-tions and enquiries of the authors themselves.

Dr. D’Allesandro-Scarpari has produced a fascinating study of the production of savoir geogra-phique during colonial and postcolonial times when the old relationship between France and thenewly independent states remained an important facilitating link for field research by Frenchscholars. Her book privileges evidence in the form of the published word but I felt that greaterstress might have been placed on the biographies of the scholars interviewed and on informationderived from obituaries and memorial essays for key figures (such as Jean Gallais and Gilles Saut-ter). Why did these men e and the sample studied was entirely male e go to Africa in the firstplace? Who enthused them (one presumes at the Sorbonne) and shaped their work and subsequentcareers? To what extent was the generation of French geography in Africa part of a grand plan toresearch the globe or was it simply a collation of chance opportunities and circumstances? Perhapsto answer such questions demands the breadth of vision of a senior practitioner rather than theconcentrated reading and critical energy of a young researcher. Connoisseurship rather than tex-tual analysis may be the way ahead. Despite such questions remaining in my mind, Geographes enbrousse provides a helpful contribution to our understanding of the evolution of African ‘brands’of French geographical scholarship before the move toward urban studies on the continent overthe past three decades.

Hugh CloutUniversity College London, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2007.01.017

Anngret Simms, H.B. Clarke and Raymond Gillespie (Eds), Irish Historic Towns Atlas, Volume II,Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 2005, 180 pages, V150 hardback.

Once again, Irish geographers and other scholars have produced a truly remarkable book. Theidea of an historical atlas of towns goes back to 1955 when the International Commission for