PositiveFinancial TimesThe intricate vocabulary used to talk about land is one of the many pleasures of Land ... Yet the rich language — whether describing the physical attributes of terrain, or legal rights of ownership and access — also reflects the centrality of land to human societies ... Land also recounts the heroic feats of engineering, with a gripping account of the vast Dutch endeavour to drain the 1.2m acres of the Zuider Zee ... The core of the book, though, is a sobering history of the many acts of dispossession that have led to gross economic inequalities and festering conflicts around the world ... His overarching thesis — overstated but not by much — is that struggles over land, and human hunger to possess it, lie at the root of most human conflicts ... he makes it clear there are no easy answers when it comes to either conservation or land reform ... When it comes to setting out an overarching thesis, the book is perhaps slightly less than the sum of its parts. But it packs in a wealth of ideas and human drama — and gives a fresh view of centuries of social conflict seen through a geographer’s lens.
