Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Published 2015 · 352 pages · 80,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Geography, History, Nonfiction, Politics & Society
How hard is Prisoners of Geography to read?
Prisoners of Geography scores 17 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 25 out of 100
- Journalistic. Geopolitical terms well-explained.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Theory grounded in specific geographic features.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with geopolitical examples and analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Ten region-based chapters.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- Maps as analytical tools rather than symbols.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Straightforward analytical tone.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Each chapter explains its region clearly.
- Structural complexity: 18 out of 100
- Ten parallel-structured regional chapters.
How Prisoners of Geography is regarded
Prisoners of Geography holds a literary regard score of 38 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.