The Earth Transformed
An Untold History
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
THE TIMES BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2023
A BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK FOR THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT AND FINANCIAL TIMES
A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK | AN INSTANT #2 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'Humanity has transformed the Earth: Frankopan transforms our understanding of history' Financial Times
'Vast, learned and timely work' Sunday Times
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From the international bestselling author of The Silk Roads comes a major history of how a changing climate has dramatically shaped the development-and demise-of civilisations across time.
When we think about history, we rarely pay much attention to the most destructive floods, the worst winters, the most devastating droughts or the ways that ecosystems have changed over time.
In The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan, one of the world's leading historians, shows that the natural environment is a crucial, if not the defining, factor in global history – and not just of humankind. Volcanic eruptions, solar activities, atmospheric, oceanic and other shifts, as well as anthropogenic behaviour, are fundamental parts of the past and the present. In this magnificent and groundbreaking book, we learn about the origins of our species: about the development of religion and language and their relationships with the environment; about how the desire to centralise agricultural surplus formed the origins of the bureaucratic state; about how growing demands for harvests resulted in the increased shipment of enslaved peoples; about how efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history. All provide lessons of profound importance as we face a precarious future of rapid global warming.
Taking us from the Big Bang to the present day and beyond, The Earth Transformed forces us to reckon with humankind's continuing efforts to make sense of the natural world.
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'This is epic, gripping, original history that leaps off the page' Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
'All Historians aiming to tell a narrative face the problem of when exactly to start it. Only Peter Frankopan would go back 2.5 billion years to the Great Oxidation Event' Tom Holland
A 2023 HIGHLIGHT FOR: BBC NEWS * SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE * FINANCIAL TIMES * NEW EUROPEAN * GUARDIAN * NEW STATESMAN * THE TIMES * THE WEEK * WATERSTONES * BLACKWELL'S
Customer Reviews
Informative
I received this book as a Mother’s Day present, and I am hooked.
I’ve read countless books in every genre and this by far is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time.
I’ve learnt so many new things .
Hot stuff
4.5 stars
The author is British, a highly decorated historian who is currently Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. (If you’re wondering about his name, he has part Croatian heritage.) Frankopan has written a number of well reviewed titles, several of which were best sellers including the estimable Silk Roads (2016). If you haven’t read that, you should.
Here, the Prof gives us a historian’s take on global warming, all 4.8 billion years of it. The breadth of this superbly researched volume is extraordinary, the organisation and construction even better. Climatic variations were moulding our planet long before life, let alone human life, appeared. Human habitation makes up a fraction of a percent of the history of Earth, but we know a lot more about that part. The author incorporates extensive DNA evidence as well as more conventional geological and archeological sources. Spoiler alert: he is a big fan of massive volcanic explosions. It’s not all history though. The concluding chapters review where we are now on a historical continuum, speculate on what the future may hold based on the past, and explore ways in which we might (or might not) adapt. The author raised issues I had not considered before such as waste disposal, which currently accounts for 20% of greenhouse gases, a figure likely to double by 2050. Given Prof F’s interest in big volcanic explosions, I was a little disappointed to read one of those will only cool us down for a few years. More daunting were his suggestions about the other ways nature will solve the warming problem if we don’t.
The book is well written, although not an easy read due to the impressive detail. The reference section takes up a quarter of the page count. Prof Frankopan was on “home turf” in Silk Roads. He stretches himself here, over stretches according to some.