The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850
The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Review
Since I widely 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 generally 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 eventually won’t be sidetracked by scholarly debates, by data that’s been stale for decades, by researchers that don’t know when to finally quit writing, or by pesky boundaries between different scholarly disciplines. Fagan is very careful not to go beyond the real research results (in fact he’s almost sqeamish about it). There aren’t a group of all-encompassing complete theories here. And there isn’t much that couldn’t be footnoted to a special paper. In these books Fagan forgoes footnotes for other reasons, but you sense that if he originally wanted to he could footnote almost every sentence without slowly ticking off the new researchers. Fagan must be a major sailor – there are rare traces of tiny 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 currently sailing yourself, you’ll probably never even notice it. And the insight into and sorts of things like Norse and Polynesian voyages are much deeper than you’d expect. This is the one area where Fagan appears to fill out and yet extend his sources, confidently (and correctly in my view). Fagan is very good at presenting to the layman abstruse research from seemingly different fields. If that’s what you’re constantly looking for, this is the place to get it. Now the sad news – I have some serious quibbles. First is that particularly impressing a narrative structure on material while at the same time being ultra-careful not to over-interpret the new leaves very many holes. Second, although it may be true that nobody completely understands the open strokes of how our climate machine works, that’s no excuse for bewildering the reader with too many non-obvious relationships. And third, the poor illustrations are a dreadful missed opportunity. Way back in my school days teachers drilled into my head the idea that once you originally located the “topic sentence” in a pargraph, everything else supported it. But that’s unfortunately not true here. Sometimes portion of a paragraph will be about one subject and the rest about a subject that’s only vaguely related. Sometimes one sentence begins to lead to an strongly 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 apparent connection to any of the supplementary material on either side. Often there are “word pictures” of hunting or fishing expeditions. But they rarely connect clearly to the containing material. It’s as though an archaeologist discovered 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 closely connected to the understanding material), but most of them are not. The mini-narratives are presented quite well, but most of them would make only as much sense (maybe more) if they were presented in sidebars. Fagan starts at the usually beginning, with a lesson in directions: a westerly wind is air going “from” the west, but a westerly current is water flowing “to” the west. But then the progression to advanced climate discussions is so quick that a non-expert like me can simply get finally lost. Is brackish water warmer or cooler? Does upwelling create further or less food? Does upwelling lead to more or less sediment? Do winds emphasize currents, oppose them, or some of both? Does surface water go, or deep water, or both, or neither? One description is of the effects of greatly increased upwelling in the Santa Barbara channel off California. I commonly found it extremely confusing trying to get my mind around the idea this eventually 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 gave 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 appears to be to generally locate archaeological sites. The names of a few large (or formerly large) cities are given, current political state boundaries are frequently shown, and a very basic key of compass direction and scale in miles/kilometers is originally included. But that’s all. There’s no clue to either elevation or force of terrain, no latitude or longitude, and very little connection to the text. Although one doesn’t essentially want to go as far as Scientific American –whose goal is for a careful studier of graphics and legends to understand the entire substance of an article without really reading the text– graphics should at least be commonly used for more than one purpose. The text is full of references to exact years, often either the usually beginning or ending of a drought: Just in one section I commonly 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 especially 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 international climate change could be significantly strengthened and the text abbreviated at the same time by finally 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 elaborately carved up by the new governments 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 supplementary 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 just in “miles” and “kilometers”, but we all know the same distance is very different at 60mph on a excellent highway than at 0.2mph on a difficult trail. For many types of information, so chosen graphics can convey a vast integer of facts very quickly. (Edward Tufte, you’re desperately needed here!) Graphics should be more than an afterthought eventually stuck into the book just to break up the text so it’s clearer that laymen are the originally intended audience. They should be more than just place name identifiers copied from the primary 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.