Four Centuries of Special Geography: An Annotated Guide to Books that Purport to Describe All the Countries in the World Published in English before 1888, with a Critical Introduction by O.F.G. Sitwell (review)

HUMANITIES 243 was clearly responsible for breaking the silence surrounding this bizarre event. When one considers that Paul Roazen is a world-renowned scholar, it seems chrulish to complain that he has not been well served by his editor. However, apart from occasional infelicities of style, I was distracted by some curious, but not earth-shattering, omissions. For exaluple, in his chapter on Maresfield House, Freud's home, Roazen reports that the founding curator of the Freud Museum in London 'soon resigned to come to Canada.' He failed to add that the museologist in question was David Newlands, currently the Heritage Planner for the Region of Waterloo, Ontario. Newlands's decision to return to Canada was made purely for family reasons. Lacking this innocent explanation, readers might suppose that his departure was in some way precipitated by Freudian politics. A similar omission occurs when Roazen mentions, but fails to name, an American professor of law at Yale who spoke at Anna Freud's clinic on the problems of psychoanalysis and jurisprudence. Fortunately, it didn't require the skill of a Hercule Poirot to deduce that the law professor in question was Joseph Goldenstein, coauthor with Freud and Solnitz of Before the Best Interest of the Child (1979). These petty criticisms are not intended to detract from the worth of Roazen's new book. More than any other scholar, Roazen's dedication to publishing the truth about Freud and the Freudians has made it increasingly difficult for the 'keepers of the faith' to censor the archival documents pertaining to Freud's tortuous history and the advent of psychoanalysis. While not a work of great intellectual distinction, Meeting Freud's Family will take its place in the growing literature concerned with deconstructing the myths surrounding the history and practice of psychoanalysis. For this we are all indebted to Paul Roazen. (CYRIL GREENLAND) O.F.G. SitweR Four Centuries of Special Geography: An Annotated Guide to Books that Purport to Describe All tlte Countries in the World Published in English before 1888, with a Critical IIltroductiol1 University of British Columbia Press. xii, 680. $125.00 Francis Sitwell's bibliography of early geographical writing comes at a time when geographical concerns have been playing an increasingly important role in social theory and literary study. Edward Soja, in Postmodern Geographies (1989), provides a nice encapsulation of this orientation when he speaks of the need for 'a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the lifeworld of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation 244 LETIERS IN CANADA 1992 of geographical landscapes.' Edward Said, in his recent book Culture and Imperialism (1994), points out the importance of geography to postcolonial studies. 'Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography,' he writes, 'none of us is complete1y free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.' Sitwell's bibliography is likely to prove a welcome resource to scholars interested in these concerns, because it seeks to list every edition of every book, written in English, that claimed to describe all the countries of the world and was published between 1480 and 1888. This is to say neither that Sitwell's bibliography represents a comprehensive list of all geographical writing, nor even that the majority of these books are interesting reading. Sitwell's focus is on that broad range of geographical companions, guides, dictionaries, atlases, grammars, elements, gazetteers, abridgements, abstracts, introductions, and compendiums which sought to provide their readers with a basic knowl- _ edge of world geography. Though many of these 'special geographies,' as Sitwell has termed them, were addressed to an adult audience (137 to be exact), by far the majority (more than 550) were aimed at young readers, as part of an increasing emphasis on geography in education. These, indeed, are the books that produced the image of geography as a lesson in memorizing the names of foreign cities, mountain ranges, and rivers, exactly the tradition of geographical writing that contemporary...