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Book reviews

ISSN 0004-0894 © The Authors.Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2006

mental regulation the book tends to bog down in details oftreaties and conferences that is a poor fit with the over-whelming focus of the book on discourse, representation,and the inscription of geopolitical space. This is not to saythat those details, only that they do not seem to fit with theoverall tone of the book, in which the focus is on instruct-ing undergraduates in the ways that critical geopolitics canreshape our worldviews.

Overall, the book is excellent, and the writing style lendsitself nicely to an understanding of the concepts introduced,with many good photos and case studies supplementing thetext. The writing is not jargon-heavy, and seems to be wellaimed at the target audience. I look forward to incorporatingthis book into my future classes, and other instructors of polit-ical geography and geopolitics would be well advised toinvestigate it before making their own book adoption choices.

Jason DittmerGeorgia Southern University

References

Braden

K and Shelley

F

1999

Engaging Geopolitics

NewYork: Prentice Hall

Dodds

K

2000

Geopolitics in a Changing World

London:Pearson Education

Flint

C

2006

Introduction to Geopolitcs

London: Routledge

Patterns of groundwater quality in sandy aquifersunder environmental pressure

by Marc J M VissersUtrecht: NGS 335, 144pp. £18.00 paperback ISBN90 6809 375 4

The report is essentially a published thesis which consists ofseveral linked chapters (which themselves are publishedpapers), all concerned with mapping and interpretation ofgroundwater quality variability in shallow unconfinedgroundwater in phreatic sand aquifers. The report iscombined with an introduction setting the context andapproach used in the study, as well as a concluding chapter.The report focuses on interpretations of natural variabilityof phreatic aquifers in two project areas in the Netherlands.Both are characterised, and made complex, by significantgroundwater-surface water interaction. The report asks andanswers three main questions: definition of the spatio-temporal distribution of groundwater quality variability, onthe influences of a range of processes in defining thisvariability, including climatic changes, and on opportunitiesfor predicting future changes in groundwater quality.

The author initially assesses groundwater flow character-istics with the numerical model MODFLOW/MODPATH todefine 3-D patterns using forward and backward particle-tracking techniques to define specific flow regimes, withthe intention of using this as a basis for water quality inter-pretation. The technique is refreshingly new and particularlyuseful, combining analysis of both flow fields and waterquality. The maps used to show the variable flow fields(travel times, travel distances) at different depths within the

aquifers are unusual and unfamiliar. However, once these arelooked at in a groundwater context, their unfamiliarity fadesand apparent usefulness becomes evident. It is difficult tosee whether these will become generally accepted for thistype of study, and one wonders whether there are betterways of illustrating the same information in less complexways. The analysis clearly provides a sounder basis forassessing spatial (3-D) water quality and its causes, com-pared with the more traditional approach of assuming amore uniform flow field.

The author uses groundwater quality data from multi-portbores at a second field site where this type of flow field analysishas also been applied to assist in explaining variability in majorand minor element variations in groundwater. The bores usedto determine water quality variability would seem to belocated along a flow transect across the groundwater basin.Only two of the eleven bores are reported to be located inthe same flow system identified by the author, reflectingthe hydro-geological complexity. The explanations of thesystem geochemistry is by nature involved using this analy-sis, and this reviewer considered the more usual definitionof redox zonation in the aquifer (as used also by theauthor) as being more useful overall than his in-depth treat-ment of stream-tube geochemistry, some of which seemedsubjective. The analysis almost becomes overly complex.

The report also investigates the behaviour of a suite of traceelements in groundwater, based on three control processes– chemical equilibria, co-dissolution/co-precipitation andsorption. Unfortunately there was significant between-batchvariability in the extensive analytical data, which reducedthe extent of coverage for the trace elements. It does how-ever illustrate the thoroughness of approach used in the study.Not surprisingly, the report concludes that co-dissolutionand co-precipitation and sorption of trace elements werecontrolling processes, whilst chemical equilibria were rela-tively unimportant.

Overall, the report provides an interesting and noveltreatment of regional variability in groundwater quality in(complex) phreatic aquifers. The combined identificationand analysis of groundwater flow regimes, land-use andtime-variant factors particularly is notable and definitelyworth considering by others faced with studies wheretraditional approaches to regional groundwater quality datainterpretation fall short, which is often.

Chris BarberCrisalis International,

Darlington, Western Australia

Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of KeyConcepts

edited by

David Atkinson, Peter Jackson,David Sibley

and

Neil Washbourne

London: I.B. Tauris, 2005, 240 pp, £14.95 paperbackISBN 1 86064 702 2

This is an excellent and long overdue reference work forstudents of critical cultural geography. The editors set out