What would our streets, cities, and neighborhoods look like if urban plans took geographers and their studies seriously? With Reclaiming the Road (University of Minnesota Press), David Prytherch shows us the promise of communities planned, designed, and built for humans, rather than solely cars. Through rich case studies, extensive historical-geographical contexts, and delightful prose, the book offers an indispensable guide for re-engineering urban space through best practices, human-centered designs and policies, and abiding attention to intersectional concepts of equity and justice. In-depth interviews with transportation advocates, city planners, and community leaders across nine U.S. cities meld with interdisciplinary yet accessible theoretical discussions to ground the analysis in both lived experience and insightful scholarship. Immersed in dialogues linking practice, advocacy, and scholarship, Reclaiming the Road wields the powers of geography to ask more of urban design and to reimagine our communities as spaces of mobility and justice.

Florida Springs: From Geography to Politics and Restoration by Christopher F. Meindl 

Freshwater springs represent sparkling trifles to the casual tourist, cherished landscapes to neighboring residents, and sources of live-giving water for everyone else. Dr. Meindl’s Florida Springs systematically unpacks the immense depth and complexity of these features to expose “competing narratives about springs, what ails them, and how we might repair the damage” (xxiii).  A skilled geographic storyteller, Meindl writes in an engaging and approachable style, accessible to both lay readers and policymakers, while navigating across the breadth of geography in remarkable ways. Blending nuanced discussions of physical science, historical geography, and public policy, Meindl masterfully illustrates the unique power of geography to synthesize a wide range of subfields and concepts to produce clear and useful understandings of landscapes and ecosystems of vital importance to all.  

Published by University Press of Florida

Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood is the first of its kind in that it takes a largely unstudied substance — permafrost — and applies it to one of the most pressing issues of the Anthropocene, extinction. The book considers how permafrost disrupts the normative definition of extinction by way of its becoming discontinuous — not just materially, but as a heterogenous and dynamical social category that has implications for all life on Earth. By situating the study in the Russian Arctic, the book also encompasses the fraught history and crucial ecological future of a nation that comprises 65% permafrost.

Published by University of Minnesota Press

Honorable mentions to Jared D. Margulies, University of Minnesota Press, “The Cactus Hunters” and to Colin McFarlane, Verso, “Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife.”

Postcards from the Baja California Border (University of Arizona Press, October 2021) by Daniel D. Arreola (Arizona State University) offers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, the border communities explored in Postcards from the Baja California Border used to be filled with revelers, cabarets, curio shops, and more. The postcards in this book show the bright and dynamic past of California’s borderlands while diving deep into the historic and geographic significance of the imagery found on the postcards.

This form of place study calls attention to how we can see a past through a serial view of places, by the nature of repetition, and the photographing of the same place over and over again. Arreola draws our focus to townscapes, or built landscapes, of four border towns—Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, and Algodones—during the first half of the twentieth century. With an emphasis on the tourist’s view of these places, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century.

Postcards from the Baja California Border is a rich and fascinating experience, one that will take readers on a time-travel journey through border town histories and geographies while celebrating the visual intrigue of postcards.

ABCs of Geography (Sourcebooks, 2022) by Adam Mathews (Western Michigan University) and Chris Ferrie (Centre for Quantum Software and Information) is a fun, accessible, and informative book about the fundamentals of geography aimed at children and, by extension, their caregivers.

James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti for Atlas of the Invisible (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021) for creating a stunning collection of maps and visualizations that tells the stories of our past, present, and future – turning massive datasets into inviting, intriguing, and sometimes disturbing presentations for both geographers and a broader audience.

2020 Alison Mountz, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago, University of Minnesota Press, 2020

2019 Adam Moore, Empire’s Labor: The Global Army that Supports U.S. Wars, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019

2018 Tara Patricia Cookson, Unjust Conditions: Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs, University of California Press, 2018

The late Clyde Woods for developing a one-of-a-kind research program engaging social and public policy issues by examining the cultural practices of those oppressed by such policies. His book, Development Arrested, was highly acclaimed and a model of interdisciplinary research. Woods will be remembered as an important mentor to many, and as a public intellectual challenging how we understand race and human geographic knowledge production.

2016 Nicole Nguyen, A Curriculum of Fear, University of Minnesota Press

2015 Stephen J. Hornsby and Richard W. Judd, Eds; Michael J. Hermann (Cartographic Designer), Historical Atlas of Maine, University of Maine Press

2014 Paul Knox, Atlas of Cities, Princeton University Press

2013 Michael Dear, Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide, Oxford University Press

2012 Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, University of California Press.

2011 Jim Kimmel and Jerry Touchstone Kimmel (photographs), Exloring the Brazos River from Beginning to End, Texas A&M University.

2010 Esther Jacobson-Tepfer and James E. Meacham, Archeology and Landscape in the Mongolian Altai (Gary Tepfer, Photography), Esri Press

2009 Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory, The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press.

2008 Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory, Center for American Places.

2007 Trudy A. Suchan, Marc J. Perry, James D. Fitzsimmons, Anika E. Juhn, Alexander M. Tait and Cynthia A. Brewer, Census Atlas of the United States, Washington, DC: US Census Bureau Press.

2006 Bruce D’Arcus, Boudaries of Dissent: Protest and State Power in the Media Age, New York, NY. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

2005 Dydia DeLyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California, University of Minnesota Press.

2004 James R. “Pete” Shortridge, Cities on the Plains: The Evolution of Urban Kansas, University of Kansas Press.

2003 Neil Smith, American Empire, Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, University of California Press.

2002 Mark Monmonier, Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and Future of Privacy, University of Chicago Press.

2001 William G. Loy, Atlas of Oregon, University of Oregon Press

2004 James R. “Pete” Shortridge, Cities on the Plains: The Evolution of Urban Kansas, University of Kansas Press.