Arm und Reich
Late academic geographer Harm de Blij has criticized Kaplan's book "The Revenge of Geography" for tending toward what de Blij interprets as environmental determinism, a school of thought often regarded as a discredited paradigm by geographers. He also argues that the book lacks acknowledgment of thinkers associated with postmodern schools of geographic thought, such as critical geopolitics. Finally, he describes Kaplan's book "The Revenge of Geography" as one of several "misleading" books on geography by non-formally trained geographers, and as such misrepresents the field to those unfamiliar (other examples that de Blij alludes to include Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" and Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel").