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Written by Kenneth C. Davis - Abridged Nonfiction - Abridgment approved by Kenneth C. Davis - 2 CASSETTES - 3 hours

Publisher, Bantam Doubleday Dell (1998)

Where was the Garden of Eden? Does the Nile run up? What's so bad about the Badlands? Kenneth C. Davis, author of the best-selling, critically acclaimed Don't Know Much About History (a New York Times best-seller for 35 weeks with over one half million copies in print) turns his inimitable wit and wide-ranging knowledge to the subject of geography, and proves once and for all that there is a lot more to it than labeling countries on a map. Did Napoleon know how far it was to Moscow? In Don't Know Much About Geography, Davis first examines the often amusing perceptions people have had through the ages about the world and the universe. For example, Columbus thought the world was shaped like a pear - and he was proved right in 1958. Davis then looks at the world map today and explores how it has been affected by historical and political changes. Transforming events like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the Persian Gulf War all involved questions of geography and gave credence to the saying - geography is destiny. Who killed the Dead Sea? Recent surveys show that Americans constitute something of a "lost society." As a nation we know less about geography than we know about history. We don't know how to read maps and we don't know where in the world we are. Don't Know Much About Geography remedies this problem. It is a book that you can read and return to with pure joy. In it Davis shows how geography really is a great crossroads of many fields: history, economics, biology, meteorology, astronomy, and even politics. And along the way, he addresses the vexing questions that have plagued most of us since grade school. What do tides have to do with tidal waves? As in his previous book, Davis makes his subject matter appealing, entertaining, and endlessly fascinating by emphasizing the personalities that helped shape the world and the "personality" of geographical concepts and places in the world.