Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature - Hardcover

Fern Andez-Armesto, Felipe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743202481 ISBN 13: 9780743202480

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2001

Synopsis

DIFFERENT OFFER (this item listed here is DIFFERENT from the title and/or picture above. Please see description & pictures by BookGems before placing an order): Edition Macmillan, First Impression 2000. ISBN: 0-333-90171-1. HARDBACK. 656 pages, size: 16.4 x 24 x 5 cm. Just light tan to paper edges. Other than that, the new and unread book remains in excellent condition: dust cover intact; black cloth hard cover bright with gilt lettering on spine; text all clean, neat and tight. Prompt dispatch from the UK.

About this title

Product Description:

Argues that geographical, agricultural, and social factors shaped the civilizations which developed in various climatic regions, and explains how the success of civilizations depends on environmental resources.

Review:

It is, perhaps, in the end, too long. When the discussion turns to the recent past and a speculative future, its course has been run. However, for the subject it is comparatively terse (Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History ran to 12 toe-stubbing volumes), and the preceding 500 pages have blown by with the heady gusto of a prevailing wind, leaving the dedicated reader short of breath. Felipe Fern“ndez-Armesto is provocative, naughty, and deeply intelligent. He enjoys language in a way few modern novelists do, let alone historians, and his panoramic sweep of the world's civilizations is a proud and preening gesture, through which he rejects, as Norbert Elias did, civilization as a self-referential western concept, and embraces a multi-civilizational world, free of a linear interpretation of time. His aim is to return humankind to its "natural" context, from which for much of the previous few centuries he has, at least in western culture, expended considerable energy extricating itself. Civilizations, resolutely in the plural, are wrought, he contends, through a systematic refashioning of nature, with occasional conditional deferments. Whether through mutual contact or exclusivity, on the frozen tundra, desert sandscapes, highlands, lowlands, grasslands or fertile alluvial plains, and with timber, mud, stone or metal, human beings have consistently come together and shaped their communities accordingly, from the Phoenicians, Aztecs and Romans to the (now-extinct) bird-eating population of the Hebridean island of Hirta. It's all about food, of course, as the Greek empire's growth from the humble olive tree illustrates, but also wind and oceans, migration and colonialism, and while he speculates that the future might lie with a Pacific culture succeeding its Atlantic equivalent, both are still fledglings compared to the Indian Ocean's role in shaping history. The author of Millennium, Fern“ndez-Armesto enlivens his voluble anthropology with empirical tales of, and from, countless travellers, while almost nonchalantly lacing his whirlwind polemic with exquisite literary reference as his appraising lens zooms in and out like a hovering hawk. He calls it an "experimental work", and "written in something like a frenzy". That may be, but it's also daring, richly allusive, and maddeningly thrilling. --David Vincent

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0743202481
• ISBN 13: 9780743202480
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 545