Knopf Publishing Group
The Earth Transformed: An Untold History
Key Metrics
- Peter Frankopan
- Knopf Publishing Group
- Hardcover
- 9780525659167
- -
- 1.25 pounds
- Science > Global Warming & Climate Change
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us.
Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in Eleventh-Century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have been met with catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and cutting-edge scientific research, Paradise Transformed will radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.
Author Bio
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is Associate Director of the Program for Silk Roads Studies at King's College, Cambridge.
He works on the history of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia/Iran, Central Asia, China and beyond.
Peter often writes for the international press, including The New York Times, Financial Times Guardian, and has a regular column in the London Evening Standard.
Peter has been described in The New Statesman as 'the history rock star du jour', and a rock-star historian (VLT - Sweden). He was named One of the World's 50 Top Thinkers by Prospect Magazine in 2019. He is a 'literary star', says The Times.
Silk Roads was named The Daily Telegraph's History Book of the Year 2015. it went to Number One in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction charts, remaining in the Top 10 for nine months in a row, as well as being #1 in China, India and many other countries around the world, selling more than 1.5m copies. It is one of 'ten books that change how you see the world' (The Times). It was named one of the 'Books of the Decade' 2010-20 by the Sunday Times.
His follow-up, The New Silk Roads, is a 'masterly-mapping out of anew world order', according to the Evening Standard, and 'a brilliant guide to terra incognita' (Sunday Times) that is reminiscent of Tolstoy (Daily Telegraph). It won the Human Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019
In December 2018, The Silk Roads was named one of the 25 most influential books translated into Chinese in the last 40 years, alongside One Hundred Years of Solitude, Pride and Prejudice, Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. In 2019, he won the prestigious Calliope Prize of the German Emigration Center, one of the richest prizes for the Humanities in Germany.
In 2016-18, Peter's Songlines audio channel in which he chose his favorite pieces of world music was part of British Airways' In-Flight Entertainment system. In 2018, The Silk Roads was chosen as part of the Government of Pakistan's Read to Lead program to encourage literacy in the country. It was the inspiration for a new character in The Vikings mini-series.
Source: peterfrankopan.com
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