Van Loon's Geography

Episode 1

Foreword

Ten years ago you sent me a letter and today you get your answer. What you wrote(I am quoting from the original)was this:

“……Yes, but how about geography?No, I don't merely want a new geography. I want a geography of my own, a geography that shall tell me what I want to know and omit everything else and I want you to write it for me.I went to a school where they took the subject very seriously.I learned all about the different countries and how they were bounded and about the cities and how many inhabitants they had and I learned the names of all the mountains and how high they were and how much coal was exported every year, and I forgot all these things just as fast as I had learned them.They failed to connect.They resolved themselves into a jumble of badly digested recollections, like a museum too full of pictures or a concert that has lasted too long.And they were of no earthly value to me, for every time I needed some concrete fact, I had to look it up on maps and in atlases and encyclopedias and blue books.I suppose that many others have suffered in the same way.On behalf of all these poor victims, will you please give us a new geography that will be of some use?Put all the mountains and the cities and the oceans on your maps and then tell us only about the people who live in those, places and why they are there and where they came from and what they are doing——a sort of human interest story applied to geography.And please stress the countries that are really interesting and don't pay quite so much attention to the others that are merely names, for then we will be able to remember all about them, but otherwise……”