The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850
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ISBN13: 9780465022724Condition: NEWNotes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
"Climate change is the ignored player on the historical stage," writes archeologist Brian Fagan. But it shouldn't be, not if we know what's good for us. We can't judge what future climate change will mean unless we know something about its effects in the past: "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." And Fagan's story of the last thousand years, centered on the "Little Ice Age," reminds us of what we could end up repeating: flood, fire, and famine--acts of God exacerbated by acts of man. For all that he takes a broad--a very broad--view of European history, Fagan's writing is laced with human faces, fascinating anecdotes, and a gift for the telling detail that makes history live, very much in the style of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. When Fagan talks about the voyages of Basque fishermen to American shores (probably landing before Columbus sailed), he puts in the taste of dried cod and the terrifying suddenness of fogs on the Grand Banks. The Great Fire of London, what it was like when the Dutch dikes broke, the Irish Potato Famine, the year without a summer, ice fairs on the Thames, and volcanoes in the South Pacific--Fagan makes history a ripping yarn in which we are all actors, on a stage that has always been changing. --Mary Ellen Curtin
Spotlight Customer Reviews:
Summary:
Almost incomprehesible
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Comment:
This book is quite poorly written.
The first chapter 'Medieval Warm Period' opens somewhere on an ice packed sea in current time. The author, apparently a sailor, tells us not of period sailing but of his own experiences on icy waters, then drifts back in time, then forward in time then who knows where in time. There is no anchor in this book, you never really know where you are or where you're going. Annoying, perhaps, off-putting, absolutely.
Since it is so poorly written, reading this book is hard work and dipping in and out of chapters it was clear that I wouldn't come away with a sense of what the little ice age was all about. So I went no further, although find the subject interesting, reading it was an unpleasant chore.
I hope someone with a sense of story telling wrote or will write one. This isn't it.
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Summary:
Tremendously interesting
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Comment:
While I'm horrified by the stories of famines (10% of the french population starved to death in 1741!?!), this book was very interesting and very well written. I enjoy history and the relationships and causes of events, and this was great for that. My understanding of rural life and society as a whole, in some parts of europe, during the middle ages and up through the early modern period has been much improved. I think this book has a pretty good discussion of the various complex and not-well-known climate factors related to these events, understandable to the lay person, and clearly separating the known from the guessed and assessing the various theories in a levelheaded way. Highly readable.
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Summary:
Climate influences History
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Comment:
I enjoy non fiction books that look at history and events from different slants. Everything from Guns Germs and Steel to Cod, Shad, Horses or Oysters. When we visited Alaska, the rangers spoke often about "the little ice age." Hmmm, I knew little snippets of cold in the recent past: the London's river froze, there was a year without summer in the early 1800's. This volume pulls it all together. It is readable, interesting and puts bit and pieces into perspective. I first saw this book in the book store at the ranger station at Exit Glacier, near Seward AK.
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Summary:
research well interpreted for the layman, yet could be better
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Comment:
Since I read two of Brian Fagan's books, "The Little Ice Age" and "The Great Warming" together, I'll review them together too.
Fagan's expertise is at digesting the latest voluminous and obscure scientific and archaeologic research results, then boiling them down and portraying them in plain (and sometimes even poetic) English for the non-professional readers. You won't be sidetracked by academic debates, by data that's been stale for decades, by researchers that don't know when to quit writing, or by pesky boundaries between different academic disciplines.
Fagan is very careful not to go beyond the actual research results (in fact he's almost sqeamish about it). There aren't a lot of all-encompassing grand theories here. And there isn't much that couldn't be footnoted to a specific paper. In these books Fagan forgoes footnotes for other reasons, but you sense that if he wanted to he could footnote almost every sentence without ticking off the original researchers.
Fagan must be a serious sailor - there are occasional bits of small boat jargon nobody else would know (or use correctly). This is a plus that's neither common nor obtrusive; unless you have some familiarity with sailing yourself, you'll probably never even notice it. And the insight into and descriptions of things like Norse and Polynesian voyages are much deeper than you'd expect. This is the one area where Fagan seems to fill out and even extend his sources, confidently (and correctly in my view).
Fagan is very good at presenting to the layman abstruse research from seemingly disparate fields. If that's what you're looking for, this is the place to get it.
Now the bad news - I have some serious quibbles. First is that impressing a narrative structure on material while at the same time being ultra-careful not to over-interpret the original leaves too many holes. Second, although it may be true that nobody fully understands the broad strokes of how our climate machine works, that's no excuse for bewildering the reader with too many non-obvious relationships. And third, the inadequate illustrations are a dreadful missed opportunity.
Way back in my school days teachers drilled into my head the idea that once you located the "topic sentence" in a pargraph, everything else supported it. But that's unfortunately not true here. Sometimes part of a paragraph will be about one subject and the rest about a subject that's only distantly related. Sometimes one sentence seems to lead to an implied "because" then the second supporting sentence, except the second sentence actually says the opposite. Sometimes what must have been an interesting tidbit from a research paper is thrust into the middle of a paragraph with no clear connection to any of the other material on either side.
Often there are "word pictures" of hunting or fishing expeditions. But they seldom connect clearly to the surrounding material. It's as though an archaeologist found a couple arrowheads, then fleshed them out into a plausible narrative. I'd hope that these mini-narratives would be a part of a larger narrative (or at least connected to the following material), but most of them are not. The mini-narratives are presented quite well, but most of them would make just as much sense (maybe more) if they were presented in sidebars.
Fagan starts at the beginning, with a lesson in directions: a westerly wind is air coming "from" the west, but a westerly current is water flowing "to" the west. But then the progression to full-blown climate discussions is so quick that a non-expert like me can easily get lost. Is salty water warmer or cooler? Does upwelling bring more or less food? Does upwelling lead to more or less sediment? Do winds emphasize currents, oppose them, or some of both? Does surface water move, or deep water, or both, or neither?
One description is of the consequences of increased upwelling in the Santa Barbara channel off California. I found it very confusing trying to get my mind around the idea this brought "more fish" and "less rain" at the same time, that it may have been a boon to island dwellers at the same time it was a disaster to mainland dwellers. I was left floundering, like a blindfolded person trying to pin "good" and "bad" labels on a donkey, but not even being in the right room.
Almost all of the illustrations are maps, whose only purpose seems to be to roughly locate archaeological sites. The names of a few large (or formerly large) cities are given, current political state boundaries are usually shown, and a very basic key of compass direction and scale in miles/kilometers is included. But that's all. There's no clue to either elevation or roughness of terrain, no latitude or longitude, and very little connection to the text. Although one doesn't necessarily need to go as far as Scientific American --whose goal is for a careful studier of graphics and legends to understand the entire gist of an article without actually reading the text-- graphics should at least be used for more than one purpose.
The text is full of references to particular years, often either the beginning or ending of a drought: Just in one section I found 550, 750, 760, 820, 860, 910, 1000BC, 300BC, 250, 292, 869, 1100, and 1519. This cries out for "time line" style graphics. In fact if each chapter had a drought time line graphic at the same scale, they could easily be lined up and compared. There'd be no need for hand-waving about some climate changes being "global", or about the connections between one region and another. The case for global climate change could be greatly strengthened and the text shortened at the same time by paying a little more attention to graphics and a little less to words alone.
The discussion of the tailing off of Mayan civilization refers to "highlands" and "lowlands". But which area is what on the map? No clue. The Yucatan peninsula has been carved up by the modern states of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. But how is it positioned in relation to continents or seas? No clue because there's no map at the other scale. How many watersheds are there and how to they relate? No clue. How long did it take to travel from one site to another? No clue, because distances are given only in "miles" and "kilometers", but we all know the same distance is very different at 60mph on a good highway than at 0.2mph on a bad trail.
For many kinds of information, well chosen graphics can convey a huge number of facts very quickly. (Edward Tufte, you're needed here!) Graphics should be more than an afterthought stuck into the book just to break up the text so it's clearer that laymen are the intended audience. They should be more than just place name identifiers copied from the original sources. And it should be possible to place a callout to each one in the text; if it's not clear where the callout should go, the connection between the graphic and the text is too weak.
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Summary:
Lively and readable history of climatic changes
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Comment:
This is another one of Brian Fagan's growing series of books on climatic changes. This one covers the period 1350 to 1850, the Little Ice Age. It starts with a brief summary of the Medieval Warm Period.
Fagan's work is always lively and fun to read. He is an engaging writer who knows how to tell a good story.
The basic case he is making is pretty simple. Climate changes over time. As it does, it has an effect on history. Pretty basic argument, one would think, but one that is often neglected by historians.
The actual substance of the book is pretty much the story of how climate is one damm thing after another, one disaster after another piling up. Fagan tells of floods and encroaching glaciers, crop failures and volcanic eruptions. He also has good news, but not a great deal of it. His strong point is always to stress how vulnerable people are to the unexpected power of climate changes.
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