Urban Social Geography: An Introduction (2000) by Paul Knox and Steven Pinch 4th ed., pub Prentice Hall. About £23 [301.34]

Paul Knox's book, first published in 1982, has steered many undergraduates through courses in both social geography and urban geography. Those of us who have had to get our hands dirty with the specialist journals in this particular field know just how impenetrable the language can be. Some of the terminology has leaked into A levels and while thankfully phrases like "socio-spatial dialectic" have not, the idea that people shape cities and are at the same time shaped by them is one A-level students can understand.

This is a good catch-up book for those who like to explore the web of ideas behind the concepts now influencing the specification content. It is also a solid reference work. If only all specialist geography texts had over forty pages devoted to a well-laid out cross-referenced glossary. Each chapter is designed to be studied, starting with a list of key questions and ending with a summary, a list of key concepts and suggested further reading. The diagrams used are well chosen and clear - I can just see fig 3.1 (p69) appearing in some form in future AS papers (the transition from industrial city to Post-Fordist metropolis in three time slices). Students might enjoy considering fig 13.1 (p358), which demonstrates 'negative externality fields' using the Dell football stadium, Southampton. The Blowers model of changes needed to meet the future sustainability of city regions is another prime candidate for an exam paper (fig 13.10, p387).

The book is a distillation of at least three decades of research by geographers and sociologists, much of it done in the UK despite the North American flavour of the jargon. Like all texts, the examples chosen illustrate a particular concept and this does mean the sources chosen are not necessarily current. Like me, you can probably pick out case studies for which the point made is no longer true or pick out maps which are frozen in their time. The urban setting is very specific to the North American and Western European experience. However, the ideas permeate much of the current geographical approach to cities wherever they are.

Not everyone will want to study this book in depth or make it their bedtime reading, but it does deserve dipping into and all of us can benefit from looking up a few phrases in the glossary.

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Poverty and Development into the 21st Century (2000) ed Tim Allen and Alan Thomas, pub The OU and Oxford UP. About £27 [330.9172]

This completely revised textbook was first published as Poverty and Development in the 1990s. It is the first of three course books for an OU course on development, but its readership is much wider because this is quite simply a very high quality piece of work. It makes good background reading for those teaching the 'Inequalities in Development' option for the GG4 essay paper (although core-periphery gets only the briefest mention - replaced by a new world order). There is also food for thought when it comes to GG5, with chapters covering issues such as hunger, environmental degradation, sustainability, urban issues, genetic engineering and overpopulation.

As it is made up of an number of 'expert' essays, it is possible to pick out the chapters which look most promising and concentrate on those. However, there ares also many self-contained boxes within each chapter including extracts, case studies and 'in a nutshell' summaries. This increases the books user-friendliness enormously. As you would expect with an OU publication, there is a real attempt to make the ideas under discussion accessible.

This is not to say that chapters such as "Meanings and Views of Development" by Alan Thomas could easily transfer to an A-level context. A classroom discussion surrounding the meaning of development is unlikely to use the terminology used here (eg neoliberalism versus structuralism), but we can take away the notion that the argument is no longer about market versus state. Alan Thomas argues that what matters now is the degree and form of intervention and the (geographical?) scale - what he calls 'people-centred development'.

Tables and diagrams have been compiled using carefully selected data from official reports - most dating from the late 1990s. The book opens with a world map showing World Bank country groupings and uses maps to illustrate the history of colonialism and independence. Case studies are used rather sparingly, but major 'regions' such as Africa, Brazil, China and India get good coverage. The index is of a high standard and makes dipping in a profitable experience. However, this is not a complete sourcebook for GG4 and even less so for GG5. Its value lies in being a readable but concentrated dose of wide-ranging academic field of study.

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