Nature''s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

Hailed as an arresting (Lawrence Klepp, New Criterion) account, Natures Mutiny chronicles the great climate crisis of the seventeenth century that totally transformed Europes social and political fabric. Best-selling historian Philipp Blom reveals how a new, radically altered Europe emerged out of the Little Ice Age that diminished crop yields across the continent, forcing thousands to flee starvation in the countryside to burgeoning urban centers, and even froze Londons Thames, upon which British citizens erected semipermanent frost fairs with bustling kiosks, taverns, and brothels. Highlighting how politics and culture also changed drastically, Blom evokes the eras most influential artists and thinkers who imagined groundbreaking worldviews to cope with environmental cataclysm.

As we face a climate crisis of our own, Bloms prodigious synthesis delivers a sharply-focused lesson for the twenty-first century: the profound effects of just a few degrees of climate change can alter the course of civilization, forever (Laurence A. Marschall, Natural History).