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Book Review
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S NOTE
EVEN THOUGH I read the reviews several times before they are published, I always find it rewarding to read the book reviews as you see them, in their final ordered version. In the review process, I peruse the books (and occasionally read one) as they come in, yet it's the final reading of the reviews as they go to press that is so instructive about environmental history. What emerges in that final version of collected reviews is an insight into the field as a whole. We owe the reviewers thanks for drawing attention to the critical issues and showing avenues for research. The reviews offer new insight into the human perception and management of nature and wilderness at all levels, highlighting diversity while serving to bring together the community of environmental historians.
MELISSA WIEDENFELD
| Sub-Saharan Africa: An Environmental History. By Gregory H. Maddox. Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, and Oxford, England: ABC-CLIO, 2006. Nature and Human Societies Series. xi + 355 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $85.00.
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| Greg Maddox is one of the pioneers of African environmental history. His early work on famine in central Tanzania and more recent work on the social and political aspects of resource use have both shaped the growth of the field. Thus he is a logical choice for a general survey of the African environment. The only other book to attempt an environmental history of Africa has been James C. McCann's Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land, which took a very different approach. Where McCann's book used a couple of case studies to make a limited number of theoretical points, Maddox—probably bound by a formula dictated by the nature of the series—tries to cover far more ground. The book takes on a tremendous amount of material in a relatively small number of pages. The result has its virtues, but may not be to everyone's liking. |
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The book is divided into three parts. The first is a chronological overview of the continent's history from an environmental perspective. Maddox does an amazingly good job of covering everything from Australopithecus to Wangari Maathai's Nobel Peace Prize in 168 pages. This is no mean feat, especially because the book appears to be pitched at an audience that knows neither the most basic outlines of African history nor the nature of its environment. The second part of the book consists of case studies on the Sahara, the Serengeti, and the origins of food production in East and Central Africa. The first and last of these seem a bit too broad to make good case studies. The treatment of the Serengeti, however, is the high point of the book. Here Maddox is working on his home turf (colonial and postcolonial East Africa) and with a smaller and more focused body of material. The result is an intriguing account of the natural history of the Serengeti and the struggle over competing human uses of the land, but also of varying human interpretations of "wilderness." The last bit of the book is a collection of primary documents, ranging from an account by a Tanzanian man of his understanding of the history of central Tanzania to an excerpt from Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the text of the CITES agreement. There is also a glossary so large and thorough that it might qualify as a discrete section of its own. |
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The book likely would be most useful as a resource for someone teaching a course on environmental history who wants to include Africa, but lacks formal training in the area. One could easily crib some good lectures from the case studies and the glossary would be a valuable resource. Unfortunately, at $85 and only in hardback, the book is probably too expensive for use as a survey textbook, though the first section of the book would serve admirably in that role. |
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Erik Gilbert, is professor of history at Arkansas State University and the author of Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar (Boston, 1996) and, with Jonathan Reynolds, Africa in World History (Prentice Hall, 2004) and Trading Tastes (Prentice Hall, 2005). |
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