Chicago: A Geography of the City and Its Region

and social relations. Although this chapter is engagingly written and masterfully juxtaposes theoretical explanations and illustrative examples, I remain unconvinced that a stage metaphor substantially advances rural theorizing over other approaches that also highlight identity formation as an ongoing process. Not surprising in a volume of this size, the chapters are uneven in their coherence. The best provide an orderly framework for understanding the development and application of concepts in a particular realm, combined with a cogent critique of those ideas. The worst are models of obfuscating social science jargon that strain the patience of a reader with their incessant reworking of very similar ideas in variant terminology and, ultimately, offer little more than a compendium of the literature on a particular approach. In the sense that a handbook is often thought of as a “how to” manual, the title of the volume is misleading. It is an impressively comprehensive assemblage of theory on the rural, but absent is any significant discussion of methodology for how to go about actually doing rural geography or sociology. Also notably absent are the more pragmatic strains of American rural geographic research that lead to satisfyingly deep understandings of rural places, the people who inhabit them, and the processes that influence them. Despite these shortcomings, the Handbook of Rural Studies deserves a place on the bookshelf of any graduate student or established scholar interested in rural geography and how it is conducted today.