I'm coming out of a many-year hibernation as regards Amazon reviews to warn you away from this book, and it doesn't give me any pleasure to do so.
I was considering it as a basic text for students in my ITP course "Urban Experience in the Networked Age," who are at graduate level, but generally won't have had much in the way of background in geography. I found the notion of a brisk overview of conceptions of place pretty appealing, and still do. And there are, indeed, a lot of things to like in this book -- it functions very well as an annotated bibliography, albeit an expensive one.
Why no more than that? Unfortunately, in Cresswell's hands, the mischaracterizations (particularly of Lefebvre and Heidegger) crop up early, continue throughout, and would require so much repair and backfill to correct that in the end it's just not worth my time as an instructor. The mischaracterization of work I am acquainted with was serious enough that I began to doubt Cresswell's gloss on writers and thinkers I wasn't familiar with.
There are dozens of typos (among other howlers, Heidegger's Dasein is repeatedly rendered "desein"), sentences go unpunctuated, and beyond matters of copy, the volume stands badly in need of an editor. "Activities and forms of human life and culture which threatened regional and place-based distinctiveness were thus a threat" (p. 18)? You don't say.
The tragedy here is that I'm sure Cresswell's aims and goals are largely identical with my own, and I don't think for a second he set out to write a bad book. I really wish I could wave a magic wand and turn "Place" into the book its author and I both clearly wanted it to be, but sadly, that's beyond my abilities.