I like this book. There we are, laid out straight away to inform what comes below. The book looks good, it feels like a good text, it contains many of the 'big names' in economic geography, and more importantly it is a relevant statement within economic geography. A Companion to Economic Geography fulfils its aim of demonstrating to an audience of undergraduate and postgraduate students that economic geography (as distinct to geographical economics) matters. The book stresses the centrality of (economic) geography to understanding society as we (as academics and social agents) confront, engage and exist within it. Indeed the broad argument is that " (t)he recent changes in the economy, which have affected so many people in so many different ways, are not only economic but also fundamentally geographical " (4). Positioned between other recent economic geography textbooks (Bryson et al., 1999; Clark et al., 2000) the Companion offers a thorough introduction into " the art of economic geography " (2): the editors and authors demonstrate that these are indeed interesting times to be studying within the sub-discipline. The book explicitly characterises 'doing' geography as attempting to synthesise and represent multiple and changing phenomena as they are observed. Along these lines it perhaps unsurprising that most chapters demonstrate how the themes they outline have moved on from a neo-classical, hard scientific analysis to studies that identify the diverse and 'messy' nature of society. This is to be welcomed, and indeed has been recognised elsewhere (Wills and Lee, 1997). The book provides a very useful anchor for the aspirant under-or postgraduate within the sea of a seemingly fast-changing discipline. The chapters (of which there are thirty – divided into five parts) universally serve to provide reviews of the subjects covered, providing stimulating reading in their own right, and are also very well edited to demonstrate the linked nature of much of what is discussed in the book. Moreover – and I think this is the main strength of the book – the authors serve to ask questions, probing readers into thinking about important issues, and by extension, how this influences their own work. On this point alone I would recommend the book; but more than this there are chapters of real quality within the collection. After an agenda-setting introduction by Barnes and Sheppard, the first of the five parts – 'worlds of economic geography' – starts with a historical contextualisation …