801Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 784e826

Jean-Pierre Poussou and Alain Lottin (Eds), Naissance et developpement des villes minieres enEurope, Arras, Artois Presse Universite, 2004, 558 pages, V35, paperback.

Unlike their historian cousins, historical geographers have paid little attention to the great coal-fields of Europe and the complex built environment that accompanied them and is now under-going the politically delicate process of ‘reconversion’. The present volume results from aninternational colloquium held in the premises of the new Universite d’Artois in the former min-ing towns of Lens and Lievin in northern France. Of the thirty contributors, twenty-nine arehistorians; only one, Professor Beatrice Giblin-Delvallet from the Universite de Paris VIII, isa geographer. Their focus is certainly not entirely French but there is an especially strong setof papers dealing with the rise and fall of the coalfield of northern France, where mining beganduring the ancien regime, increased dramatically during the nineteenth century, was reorganisedfollowing German destruction during World War I, was reconstructed again and nationalised inthe 1940s, and then run down during the 1970s and 1980s. The final pit closed in 1990, leavinga vast array of housing, roads and other features that now seem illogical or out of scale. Thelegacy of coal mining is not simply a matter of tip heaps, friches industrielles, and the desperatequest for alternative survival strategies; it is also a matter of accommodating an adjustment ofscale.

Local experts, Alain Lottin, Gilles Deregnaucourt and Yves Le Mamer present detailed andwell illustrated discussions of how the green countryside of Artois, with rich, intensive farms,became the ‘black country’ of northern France. Using eighteenth-century watercolours, theyrecreate small-town and village environments that one would imagine have disappeared, giventhe impact of coal extraction and the devastation by two world wars. However, fragments ofthis earlier environment are still to be found. I was intrigued by the example of Mazingarbe(p. 79) that I associate with the showcase carbo-chemical works of Charbonnages de Francebut, as a recent visit revealed, still has ancient agricultural buildings and a chateau (now thehotel-de-ville) in the midst of post-industrial dereliction. Madame Giblin-Delvallet movesfrom the landscape legacy of mining to identify the complex entanglement of social, politicaland economic factors behind the protracted closure of the mines between 1962 and 1990.Trade-unions of communist and socialist persuasion defended coal, in harsh contrast with thepolicies of central governments, both left and right. The presence of Polish Catholic miners,whose allegiance was socialist but not communist, added an interesting complication at localscale.

Denis Varaschin from the Universite d’Artois reports on the remarkable activity of forty of hisgraduate students who, with appropriate training and guidance, ventured into the vast uncata-logued collections of the archives departementales du Pas-de-Calais that deal with the contentiousissue of dommages de guerre and compensation. Combining the sorting and classification of docu-ments with writing their dissertations, these young historians elucidated many of the mysteries ofinter-war reconstruction across the coalfield. Varaschin summarises their findings with regard tothe revival of the mines, installation of temporary housing and creation of planned suburbs andcites, equipped with modern facilities. The northern (ex-) coalfield is certainly not all the backdropof Germinal; it is also an intricate array of broad streets, garden suburbs, community centres,sports stadia and reconstructed churches that are totally different from the crowded corons of ear-lier decades.

802 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 784e826

Other essays on northern France deal with the rise of specific mining settlements, the grad-ual modification of the coalfield’s (rural) administrative structure to take account of the mas-sive injection of people and activities, and the popularity of association football as a meansof forging and reinforcing identity among mining families of many different origins. An in-teresting paper by Stephane Rio identifies the importance of private landlords in and aroundDouai who provided rented accommodation for miners and other workers not housed by pa-ternalistic mine owners in corons or cites. Three contributions examine the representation ofthis pays noir, first, in novels published between 1866 and 1885 (before Zola’s Germinal );then, in the copious writings of Victor-Eugene Ardouin-Dumazet at the end of the nineteenthcentury; and, finally, in twentieth-century films. The frame is then enlarged to embrace dis-cussions of other forms of mining (iron, slate) in various parts of France (Anjou, Burgundy,Lorraine, the Alps) and abroad (Slovakia, Spain, Wales). A bibliographic essay by Yves Per-ret-Gentil is articulated around three thousand items on numerous aspects of mining historyin France.

Naissance et developpement is a most welcome addition to the literature on the history e and, infact, the historical geography e of the mining territories of northern France and elsewhere. Itexemplifies the enviable vitality of the Department of History at the Universite d’Artois (Arras)and the remarkable ability of their young university press to produce a large book on good paper,with many colour illustrations, at a very reasonable price (V35).

Hugh CloutUniversity College London, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2005.09.013

Alphonso Lingis, Trust, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004, 207 pages, US$18.95paperback.

The works of Alphonso Lingis are always alive with the possibilities of language. He has that ‘waywith words’ that all good travel writers need to conjure a tangible presence from their fleeting ‘ex-otic’ encounters with the everyday lives of others. His pellucid style facilitates this constant pas-sage between what seems at once magical and mundane, between the resembling/dissemblingword and the world, re-telling events in such ways that the estrangement inherent in writingalso allows the reader to become a little more familiar with the lives of strangers. As one mightexpect, as a translator of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, Lingis is always open about his texts’ rep-resentational inadequacies, he confesses every author’s reductive and perhaps unethical impulsesto make flesh into mere words.

Trust is the latest of a series of books in which Lingis presents a geographic phenomenology ofencounters with diverse and diverting places and people. Whether in Addis Ababa or Kathmanduhe illuminates the individual, historical and cultural differences that, often unknowingly and beau-tifully, still afford some semblance of resistance to the homogenizing tendencies of globalization.He uncovers eloquent histories of social adaptation that, in a few short sentences, speak volumes