CURIOSITY, INQUIRY, AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION. By Daniel W. Gade

CURIOSITY, INQUIRY, AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION. By DANIEL W. GADE. xviii and 307 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781433115417. Flourishing in Vermont at age seventy-six, Dan Gade stands out: a stunningly graceful, eloquent, active, and thoughtful exponent of a genre of geography that doubters might think dead and jargon-addled blather-brandishers would wish vanquished. Gade is a longtime advocate of a variety of geography that he describes as "cultural-historical," drawing the term from the writings of Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer, and in its defense no punch is pulled. A quintessential practitioner, Dan is in a class by himself: his essays clear, his field studies impeccable, his appetite for work in foreign languages unchecked (French, Spanish, German, Quechua), his originality splendid and informed by a thorough understanding of the roots and rills and roads of geography and kindred disciplines. And as an exploration of why Gade works as he does, this book busts one out. Here is a memoir of a career and the guiding thoughts that underlie a geographical life, and it's hard to think of work by another geographer that is even remotely similar. Dan Gade's theme in this 2011 study, as he quickly puts it, is the intertwining of "essays and personal memory to bear witness to how the voracious drive to know can engage the human mind about the world" (p. xiii). Grounded in the need to explain, to continue learning, and to understand one's own life, this is an intensely personal book and useful in universal ways that humanists will especially love, recognizing in Dan's declaration of faith the same wellsprings that rebound through the Charles Homer Haskins lectures by Donald W. Meinig and Yi-Fu Tuan, and almost as much so in the writings of the late Denis Cosgrove. But more than the work of any of those three, Dan's career is based in field studies, often undertaken in difficult places and embracing challenges not many would engage: Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Andean Highlands, rural sites in France, Spain, and Italy. And in that work is more than physical courage; Gade has been willing to call out the blunderers and blusterers that dog geography worse than most disciplines. If there's clarity to be found in scholarship, its discovery has a great deal to do with what we realize about how we learn. As Gade writes, "Geographical scholars are a particular brand of curious pilgrims who seek to create new knowledge about the world. In that framework centering on place, they integrate information into new configurations. Just as a pilgrim advances closer to his or her objective, research is a process of moving from obscurity to light and from indeterminacy to insight" (p. 168). Perhaps I should confess, near the outset, that I was trained long ago by reading the oeuvre of Dan Gade. Still findable in my disheveled files is a copy of the Gade curriculum vitae, dated 1086. How that came to me is in itself a story: I was talking with Jim Parsons, the Berkeley geography professor who advised me through my graduate studies, when he suddenly raised his head from a file folder he'd absently been thumbing through (unconcerned about appearances, he was the ultimate multitasker). Out whisked a brace of neatly stapled papers: a copy of Daniel W. Gade's c.v., undoubtedly sent along with a letter requesting support for a fellowship or grant or some such. "You should have this," Jim said, "Dan's the sort of geographer someone like you needs to know about." And so I did. More a quarter-century later, I recognize the similarities: Jim and Dan were consummate samplers, going project to project, publishing a wealth of articles in the broadest scattering of journals and magazines, and neither showed anything beyond the most fleeting interest in settling down to a single theme or course of study. This is a tendency Dan admits to, drawing on the famed fragment from Archilochus (popularized by Sir Isaiah Berlin) that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. …