The Edge of the Plain

Starred review from November 14, 2022
Historian Crawford (Fallen Glory) offers an innovative and eclectic study of borders past, present, and future. Emphasizing the transience and fluidity of “physical and virtual” borders that divide people, nations, and landscapes, Crawford visits a national park along the U.S.-Mexico boundary; the city of Melilla, “a Spanish enclave... set into a peninsula of land in northeastern Morocco” that, along with its sister city Ceuta, form “the only land border between Africa and Europe”; the Green Line, which demarcated Israel and the Palestinian territories before the Six-Day War; and other locales. Throughout, he draws fascinating and original parallels between historical events, characterizing, for example, the carnage of trench warfare in the Somme during WWI as an inadvertent reenactment of the Battle of the Champions in ancient Greece. There are also rich analyses of the literature on borders (from Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis to Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing) and intriguing profiles of artists and activists including Carlos Spottorno, a Spanish photojournalist who documents the perilous journeys made by migrants traveling from the Middle East to Greece, and Hans Ragnar Mathisen, a “revolutionary” cartographer who put Sámi culture back on the Scandinavian map in the 1970s. Elsewhere, Crawford delves into climate change, mass migration, Covid-19, and other contemporary issues interwoven with borders, and offers evocative descriptions of Hadrian’s Wall, the West Bank, the Ötztal Alps (in Austria and Italy), and more. This is a vital and eloquent reminder that borders control “our landscapes, our memories, our identities.”(Jan.) Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly noted that this was the author's first book. It also misstated that the Battle of the Champions occurred in ancient Rome.