Welsh Journals

theless, the reviewer feels that of the earlier geographers Unstead deserves more attention for his concept of the synthetic geographical region and his call for quantification, and of more recent geographers Chorley, Haggett and Harvey might have received more attention. More on geographical thought outside Britain would have put British geography in context. Development of geography, as a University discipline and school subject, receives attention for the earlier period, but progress during the last thirty years has been largely ignored. More could have been made of our contribution to geography in the developing world through our training of African and Asian students, of the contribution of geographers practising outside our universities, and to our penetration of other disciplines and professions, reversing an earlier academic trend. It is a pity that not all the references in the text appear in the bibliography and that the criteria for an entry in the "geographical biographies" are not made explicit. Overall this is a good book especially for the period before 1970 and for many its main drawback will be its price. H.R.J.Davies. University College of Swansea. Mid-Wales: Deprivation or Development. G.C.Wenger. University of Wales. Board of Celtic Studies. Social Science Monographs No. 5. University of Wales Press. Cardiff (1980). pp. 202. ISBN 0 7083 0730 2. Price (paperback) £ 3.75. By relating her study of six communities to problems of rural devel- opment policy, Dr. Wenger has joined the growing number of younger social scientists who, like Williams, Wilding and Morgan, have broken with the conventional, ethnographic approach to Welsh rural life. Her study brings together detailed accounts of these communities, the results of a survey of patterns of employment, income and social attitudes, and some comments and suggestions about development policy. The village studies offer valuable evidence about some of the factors that have impeded economic growth in Mid-Wales though in her account of Rhayader, for example, Wenger misses the crucial point that its relatively successful development was due not to 'intangibles which can be hard to predict' but largely to the fact that it had had a particularly effective district clerk and a relatively large rate-income from the Elan Valley waterworks. The social survey also furnishes useful and interesting data, though since the tabulations do not give absolute numbers and no tests of significance are used, the statistical significance of the percent- age differences is unclear. More generally, the study is flawed by poor editing and by the use of ambiguous colloquialisms, of vacuities like 'the communality of social domains' and neologisms such as the verb 'tocomplexify\ Dr. Wenger's discussion of development policy is open to rather more serious criticism. Her account certainly demonstrates very