"The aim of this book is to introduce students to a wide range of important and exciting work in human geography. The primary audience is students in colleges and universities. We decided to write this book because many of the standard texts are too big, and increasingly too expensive to provide the accessible and affordable base most of us need for our human geography courses. The overly large and expensive books available now have grown into, to use Henry Jamess description of many nineteenth-century novels, "loose and baggy monsters." There is room for a more interesting and subtle book than the standard texts. This briefer and more accessible alternative is written in a more familiar style that can be augmented by other resources. We can use as metaphor the attempts on the big Himalayan peaks. In the 1970s, the attempts were increasingly organized as large teams with many climbers and elaborate systems of camps and base camps.

Then, in the late 1970s, a number of climbers dispensed with the large teams and sought to climb alone or with one other climber. Less burdened by organizational weight, they were much more successful in reaching the summits in quick direct assaults. This book adapts a similar ethic of "light and fast" that affords more flexibility to instructors than a traditional textbook. Not an exact metaphor, to be sure, but close enough to give you a sense of the books character and mission"--.