Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, of Europe and Europe's Encounter with the World (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) - Hardcover

Pyne, Stephen J.

3.79

14 ratings by Goodreads

9780295975962: Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, of Europe and Europe's Encounter with the World (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0295975962 ISBN 13: 9780295975962

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 1997

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Stephen Pyne takes the reader on a journey through time, exploring the terrain of Europe and the uses and abuses of these lands as well as, through migration and conquest, many parts of the rest of the world. Vestal Fire takes its title from Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth and keeper of the sacred fire on Mount Olympus. But the book's title also suggests the strength and limitations of Europe's peculiar conception of fire, and through fire, of its relationship to nature. Between the untamed fire of the wilderness and the tended fire of the hearth lies a never-ending dialectic in which human beings struggle to control natural forces and processes that in fact can sometimes be directed but never wholly dominated or contained.

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Review:

Vestal Fire is Stephen Pyne's masterpiece. In it, he offers nothing less than a retelling of all of European history from a vantage point no other historian has ever adopted so consistently before: that of the fire which in Pyne's view burns at the very heart of Western civilization." --William Cronon "from the Foreword " Vestal Fire is Stephen Pyne's masterpiece. In it, he offers nothing less than a retelling of all of European history from a vantage point no other historian has ever adopted so consistently before: that of the fire which in Pyne's view burns at the very heart of Western civilization." --William Cronon "from the Foreword " "Vestal Fire" is Stephen Pyne's masterpiece. In it, he offers nothing less than a retelling of all of European history from a vantage point no other historian has ever adopted so consistently before: that of the fire which in Pyne's view burns at the very heart of Western civilization."--William Cronon "from the Foreword "

Synopsis:

Part of a suite of books that narrates the story of the impact of humanity's attempt to control fire, this volume focuses on the seat of Western civilization. In this unique perspective on European history, Pyne (history, Arizona State U.) sweeps through over 3,000 thousand years chronicling how flames have been harnessed for agriculture and indust

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