Generally considered the father of anthropogeography and a trailblazer of geopolitical thought, the trained zoologist and geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was both influential and controversial even during his lifetime. Nowadays, he is perhaps best known for developing the concept of Lebensraum (living space), which both Imperial German and National Socialist thinkers embraced, with the result that Ratzel and his works were dismissed in the second half of the twentieth century. Ian Klinke's intellectual biography Life, Earth, Colony surveys Ratzel's body of work, which in addition to his well-known political geography includes biopolitics, ethnography, journalism, creative and travel writing, and colonial activism. The book contextualizes his intellectual journey and manifold interests, identifying a fascination with death as the defining characteristic of his oeuvre. By unpacking Ratzel's theories and concepts, Klinke unearths their contradictions and reveals why theorists from widely different schools of thought exploited them. He also examines the broader reception of Ratzel's ideas, and by tracing their impact up to today provides a necrology of sorts for the geographer himself.

Despite the book's chronological organization around phases of Ratzel's life and corresponding intellectual interests, Klinke's lines of inquiry are historical, theoretical, and political in nature. The author begins by reviewing Ratzel's biography in the context of major influences, ranging from Charles Darwin's and Ernst Haeckel's works to the fascination with death and decay he developed during his service in the Franco-Prussian War, to the personal and political observations he made as a travel writer in the settler colonialist and racialized United States. Klinke argues that Ratzel's American travels profoundly influenced his intellectual development. Highlighting the conclusions that the German drew from his interactions with different races and political traditions in America, Klinke examines Ratzel's perceptions of slavery and race amid ongoing settler colonialism and demonstrates that, in conjunction with his admiration of the US Frontier narrative, Ratzel's adoption of American racism set the tone for his subsequent race theories.

Klinke then dedicates an entire chapter to examining Ratzel's most-discussed concept, Lebensraum, showing how the geographer did not invent the term but merged his prior, mostly scientific ideas with notions borrowed from other scientists and thinkers. Klinke argues that Ratzel's contribution was the transformation of individual and partly scientific ideas “into a unified political theory” (107). He then highlights this political theory's cornerstone, which marks precisely the crossover from life sciences to politics: Ratzel's belief in war as evolutionary struggle through which organisms, such as states, develop military prowess, spatial consciousness, and additional strengths that allow them to progress to higher forms of being. According to this theory, a strong awareness of space, which finds its most important application in agriculturalism, drives different forms of colonialism. This co-optation of colonization as a transhistorical process that, in turn, characterizes all life forms—and its resulting relevance for the imperial project—led Ratzel to endorse settler colonialism and become an important theorist of (and public advocate for) German imperialism.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Klinke's volume is his chapter on “Death and Necropolitics,” in which he traces hitherto uninvestigated necropolitical aspects of Ratzel's thinking. Ratzel understood death and decay as part of a life cycle in not only nature but also civilizations, states, and individuals, viewing both as cleansing processes necessary for the health of a (national) body and deducing, thereby, that a strong connection to a state's soil as both a physical and symbolic site augurs the inevitable disappearance of Naturvölker (primitive peoples) who do not pursue such a connection. The fixation on (the aesthetics of) death and decay not only provided another argument in favor of settler colonialism and the imperial project but also pointed to the fascist preoccupation with decay of civilizations and celebration of heroic death as greatness's predecessor. Perhaps most helpful for a modern-day assessment of Ratzel's oeuvre, Klinke traces how Ratzel's ideas have influenced others via both acceptance and rejection, discerning a stronger North American interest in Ratzel's Anthropogeographie (1882–1891) while seeing European thinking as more influenced by Ratzel's Lebensraum concept and his necropolitical geography. The latter had wide-reaching consequences for fascist ideology and, for that reason, interest in Ratzel's work declined after the end of the Second World, despite a lingering relevance for transatlantic geopolitics. As Klinke notes: “While Ratzel has retained his admirers on the political right into the early twenty-first century, he has primarily remained a figure of historical interest among scholars” (189).

This volume successfully balances the difficulties facing any scholar of Ratzel, that is, the need to condense his extensive, not always original, but cohesive, and well-written oeuvre into a persuasive analysis that neither adulates the breadth of his intellectual productivity nor reduces it to the precursor of Nazi Lebensraum ideology. Klinke succeeds in shedding light on Ratzel's “understanding of nature-society relations” (4), reevaluating his ambiguous political position, which did not fit the mold of German politics of his time, and demonstrating his impact as a public intellectual. Klinke thus delivers an informative and highly readable study. Meticulously researched and boasting an extensive bibliography, it unpacks the idiosyncrasies and contradictions in Ratzel's thought without losing any nuances and convincingly situates him within his era's scientific and political context. Any remaining inconsistencies are due to gaps in Ratzel's theoretical framework. This book will be of great value to anyone interested in the origins of geopolitics, the foundation of German colonial ideology, and a fuller picture of one of Germany's most problematic Imperial thinkers and his complex reception.