The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

Rating:
Summary: A must-read
Review: In this highly informative book, author and professor of anthropology, Brian Fagan, looks at the changes in climate that have racked the Earth since the end of the last Ice Age some 15,000 years ago. During these years, as civilization began, and then spread, periodic and unpredictable climate changes have affected human history, often with catastrophic results. With chapters covering climactic events from 18,000 years ago to right up to the present, the author spins a fascinating tale of climate and history, as they changed together throughout the millennia.

Overall, if found this to be a very interesting book. On the down side, its various chapters do not tie together in a progressive unfolding of history, but instead hop from subject to subject, like a series of articles. But, that said, this is a fascinating book. The author has an excellent grasp on both human and climactic history, and he succeeds in putting them together to tell the story of mankind, bringing out information that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

I really enjoyed this book, and must admit to have found its lesson of unpredictable, but inevitable, climate change to have been quite sobering. If you want to understand human history, and I mean really understand it, then you must read this book!


Rating:
Summary: The Very Long Summer
Review: Tepidly written, annoyingly repetitious, and carelessly edited, "The Long Summer" will disappoint those many readers who have enjoyed Brian Fagan's earlier works. There is very little new here, though the discussion of the rise of cities is quite interesting, and communication of the bitter cold during the Ice Age and how Cro-Magnons coped with it is fascinating. Most readers, though, will prefer David Keys's "Catastrophe" and Simon Winchester's "Krakatoa."

Rating:
Summary: The Very Long Summer
Review: Tepidly written, annoyingly repetitious, and carelessly edited, "The Long Summer" will disappoint those many readers who have enjoyed Brian Fagan's earlier works. There is very little new here, though the discussion of the rise of cities is quite interesting, and communication of the bitter cold during the Ice Age and how Cro-Magnons coped with it is fascinating. Most readers, though, will prefer David Keys's "Catastrophe" and Simon Winchester's "Krakatoa."

Rating:
Summary: The Long Summer
Review: The Long Summer is a brilliant account of climate change and human society over the past 15,000 years. We learn about Cro-Magnons, the first Americans, the beginnings of farming, and explore the rise and fall of early civilizations. With skillful panache combined with meticulous research, Fagan covers both familiar and unfamiliar ground,some of it known only to specialist archaeologists. This remarkable book puts today's debates about global warming into a much needed historical context and is a worthy successor to Fagan's two earlier books on climate change, Floods, Famines, and Emperors, and The Little Ice Age.

Rating:
Summary: Portrait of our own future?
Review: The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization is another of Brian Fagan's volumes on the interaction of climate and human history. (Others I have read are the Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850, and Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations). As with the others, this book chronicles the changes in climate throughout the globe and notes the changes effected in the human condition. Whether there is actually a direct correlation between the two or not it would be difficult to really prove since historic events are nonrepeatable, but the frequency with which major changes in human behavior have occurred when climate has shifted is certainly very suggestive. Like most such claims, however, there is probably more to the reality of the situation than is apparent from this distance. His topic, however, is not without significance for our own world, so I highly recommend reading it!

The author discusses El Nino, the Southern Oscillation, and the Gulf Stream "conveyor belt" and the effects of the introduction of increased fresh, cold water into it as he does in his other books. A more complete discussion of these phenomena was given in Little Ice Age, however, so if the reader is a little confused by the more limited introduction in this book or is simply curious about them, he/she should definitely read LIA for clarification.

Some of the author's points were not new to me. In particular I had read a collection of articles on the concept of human evolution as driven by continental drift and its effect on the Gulf Stream and climate. I have also recently read a book (Secrets of the Sands: The Revelations of Egypt's Everlasting Oasis), which discusses climate change and lifestyle, in this instance that in Egypt and its Oases. The theory that the invasions of the Sea Peoples into Asia Minor, the Levant and Egypt were climate driven had been discussed as early as the '60s and '70s. Other points were probably predictable but had never occurred to me, for instance that the attacks on settled societies by desert invaders were driven by the desperate living conditions of the latter with a major dry spell. Most of the history of the ancient near east is studied from the perspective of the city dwellers, the marginal populations being treated as "unfortunate" intrusions which brought collapse. One almost gets a sense that they did so arbitrarily just to be difficult!

An interesting book. It might provide something of a background for courses on ancient civilization. Certainly it would make the ebb and flow of nomadic populations and their impact on the settled societies they boardered more sensible.

For those WRITING PAPERS in history, climatology, sociology, and political science: one might look at the effects of climate on ancient societies and predict the likely outcome of a similar down turn on today's populations. Look at writers like Per Bak (How Nature Works: the Science of Self-Organized Criticality), whose studies of sentinel events suggests that every possible event will ultimately occur with a different probability and at unpredictable times, or Stuart Kaufman (At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity) whose work suggests that such events actually help increase organization. How might these authors' works actually support Fagan's thesis? What would they say about the future of our own civilization?

Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Look at the Effects of Climate on Human Life
Review: The title of this book, i.e., The Long Summer, pertains to the period of time since the end of the last Ice Age. Although the book covers quite an immense period, as well as covering both eastern and western hemispheres, the author never loses his focus: the effects of climate on humans, their lifestyles, habitation, hunting, agriculture, etc. The book is well written by a well-known expert in the field. The information presented is supported by recent findings in the fields of archaeology and climatology. The writing is clear and engaging such that the book is difficult to put down. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves to read about ancient history and, in particular, about potential causes for the rise and fall of past civilizations.

Rating:
Summary: Good overview, but needs more concluding analysis
Review: This book describes the impact of climate change on human history from the last Ice Age to 1200, with a very brief commentary on modern times. The many examples Fagan cites illustrate the vulnerability of past civilizations, particularly to drought. The author demonstrates the wide-ranging knowledge of archaeology and anthropology we have come to expect from him. He explains climatic science in layman's terms, with helpful maps and diagrams.

Fagan wants to convince us that our present civilization also is vulnerable to climatic change. As he puts it, we have accepted vulnerability to the big, rare disaster in exchange for a better ability to handle the smaller, more common stresses. Unfortunately, his short concluding chapter does not develop that argument sufficiently. A bit more prognostication would have been welcome.

Rating:
Summary: Read this book
Review: This is a great synthesis and one that everyone should read. Never mind those who claim some details are not correct. It is the overall scope of the history of this planet that is the important focus. Despite a long history of overpopulation and deforestation, we still have not learned to live reasonably and in harmony with our world. Ancient Egypt was once in a benign Sahara, but it was turned into a desert. Once a society is on the edge of environmental vulnerablity, it takes very little to push it over: a change in weather patterns, a drought, a 500 year cold snap (such as happened in Europe in the 14th century). It seems that we do not learn from the past but have only increased the scale of our vulnerability. Sea levels rise, icecaps shrink, and the world's population is placed in a global experiment of unguessable consequences. We pollute the atmosphere and the seas. This book is a wake up call.
Fagan writes, "Civilisation arose during a remarkably long summer... We still have no idea when, or how, that summer will end."

Rating:
Summary: History From The Climate's Point Of View
Review: This is Brian Fagan's most ambitious work yet, an explanation of the development and diffusion of civilization based on climate factors. As in Floods, Famines and Emperors and The Little Ice Age, Fagan here digs into the minutiae of years of research into tree rings and glacial ice cores to illuminate just how much human history has been influenced by our planet's weather. Fagan also demonstrates that long term weather conditions and changes can be predicted with a fair amount of accuracy based on that research.

It would be easy for Fagan to capitalize on the sensationalist aspects of other "studies" of global weather and climate trends which predict imminent disaster from global warming and/or cooling. Rather than stoop to such a level, Fagan instead calmly lays out the facts about ENSO, the Gulf Stream, and other global weather patterns and demonstrates that they have been factors in the rise and fall of many civilizations, from Mesopotamia to the Mayas. Just as dispassionately, he details why climatological shifts, some of which could be dramatically quick, in all probability are due to influence some or all of our planet at some time in the future.