Book Review: Fundamentals of the physical environment, 2nd edition, by David Briggs, Peter Smithson, Kenneth Addison and Ken Atkinson, Routledge, London, 1997. No of pages xxxii+559. Price: £19.99 (pb). ISBN 0-415-10890-X. Book Review: An introduction to global environmental issues, 2nd edition, by Kevin T. Pickering and Lewis A. Owen, Routledge, London, 1997. No. of pages: xxx+512. Price: £17.99 (pb). ISBN 0-415-14099-4.

✍ Scribed by Trudgill, Stephen

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 9 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0360-1269
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1096-9837(199808)23:8<769::aid-esp899>3.0.co;2-c

✦ Synopsis

It is tempting to begin with the prejudice that second editions don't always work -certainly from my own experience, it is difficult to recapture what you thought and wrote some time ago. However, it is two additional authors who have revised Briggs and Smithson's Fundamentals of Physical Geography as Fundamentals of the Physical Environment. The original authors cite the Teaching Quality Assessment and Research Assessment Exercise as reasons for not having the time to revise it themselves.

Fundamentals is divided into several chapters concerned with weather and climate, rocks, weathering, erosion, soils, vegetation and ecosystems, and with polar, mountains, Mediterranean, dryland and humid tropical regions.