Cengage Advantage Books: Fundamentals of World Regional Geography - Softcover

Well respected for its "profile" chapter organization and complete and accurate coverage, FUNDAMENTALS OF WORLD REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY is now available in this concise Advantage Books format at a more affordable price! Specifically designed for the one-semester or one-quarter course, the text focuses on each region as a whole, emphasizing their roles in the world domain, while still exploring the critical sub-regional issues that make up each region's unique identity. Following three introductory chapters that provide the basic concepts, tools, and vocabulary for the world regional chapter, the remaining chapters of the text each focus on one of the eight world regions, describing the historical, cultural, economic, political, and physical aspects that create regional unity, give them personality, and make them newsworthy. This big picture approach, perfect for one-semester courses, places each region in a more global perspective, encouraging students to develop their own worldview. Unlike other brief world regional geography texts, however, FUNDAMENTALS OF WORLD REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY does not ignore or downplay subregional issues. The final section of each regional chapter looks at numerous specific issues and landscapes within the region that have broad implications for the rest of the region as a whole and how those issues impact other global regions.

Joseph J. Hobbs received his B.A. at the University of California Santa Cruz in 1978 and his M.A and Ph.D. at the University of Texas-Austin in 1980 and 1986. He is a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a geographer of the Middle East with many years of field research on biogeography and Bedouin peoples in the deserts of Egypt. Hobbs's interests in the region grew from a boyhood lived in Saudi Arabia and India. His research in Egypt has been supported by Fulbright fellowships, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration. He served as the team leader of the Bedouin Support Program, a component of the St. Katherine National Park project in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. His current research interests are indigenous peoples participation in protected areas in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central America; human uses of caves worldwide; and the global narcotics trade. He is the author of BEDOUIN LIFE IN THE EGYPTIAN WILDERNESS and MOUNT SINAI (both University of Texas Press), co-author of THE BIRDS OF EGYPT (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of DANGEROUS HARVEST: DRUG PLANTS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF INDIGENOUS LANDSCAPES (Oxford). He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in world regional geography, environmental geography, the geography of the Middle East, the geography of caves, the geography of global current events, the geographies of drugs and terrorism, and a field course on the ancient Maya geography of Belize. He has received the University of Missouri's highest teaching award, the Kemper Fellowship. In summers from 1984 to 1999, he led adventure travel" tours to remote areas in Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Asia, Europe, and the High Arctic. Hobbs lives in Missouri with his wife Cindy, daughters Katherine and Lily, and an animal menagerie."