Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer

Leighly, John, Ed., Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1963.

The Hispanic American Historical Review © 1964

From a review by Ralph L. Beals, UCLA in American Anthropologist, Volume 67, Issue 1, Article first published online: 28 OCT 2009 -

No other geographer of this century has been as interested in anthropology or has said so much of interest to anthropologists as has Carl Ortwin Sauer. Appropriately, ten out of the 19 writings selected for this volume are of direct interest to anthropologists. Anthropologists will find the remainder good reading. Sauer is an omnivorous reader and he writes with charm. He deals conscientiously with facts. But he also likes to discover far-reaching and unsuspected relationships, he likes to be provocative, and he does not hesitate to speculate. Many will find Sauer most satisfactory in the four papers on Human Uses of the Organic World. These are human ecology at its best, masterful correlations of complex data ranging from climates and soils, through plant genetics, to man’s place in changing the landscape.