The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850
The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Review
Brian Fagan is a famous archaeologist with an actively engaging writing style. He looks at a 500 year period, now known as the Little Ice Age, and its affect on historical events. Fagan utilizes a type of very attractive sources, like contemporary medieval journals, winery records and the business records of 14th century monastaries, to fill in his fascinating mosaic. This book isn’t strictly about weather but about the relationship of international climate changes and civilization’s struggle to survive. While Fagan doesn’t disagree that man’s use of fossil fuels may be negatively affecting our current international climate, one realizes by the purpose of the book that man has very little to do with how this planet goes, groans and changes. Ocean, wind, freezing, thawing, flooding, drought – we endure these things but we don’t cause them and we cannot radically alter them. The Earth turns at its own pace. What I commonly found most interesting about the book is the volume and large type of historical events that Fagan references, actually lost to recent memory, but newly resurrected here for the curious.