Spencer
Wells
This
turned out to be a little different from what i had expected or
thought that i was reading but, to be fair, Wells
completely fulfils his title and the expectation i ought to have had
raised, so points to him, not to me. I had, somehow, got it into my
head that the book was going to be purely about the cost of the
change in lifestyle in the Neolithic age, the agricultural revolution
when men stopped being hunter-gatherers and started being farmers.
In fact the scope of Wells’ vision is greater than that, as he
covers all sorts of consequences stemming from actions other than
that revolution (though, in the end, i suppose, it is fair to say
that the whole of civilisation stems from that change ~ perhaps
that’s how i got my mistaken impression of the book’s scope to
begin with), up to the latest, climate change. Overall, i found the
book very enjoyable, in scope, style, and content, though i could,
perhaps, have done with a little less of Wells travelling to
far-flung places at the beginning of each chapter (particularly with
regard to his concentration on anthropogenic climate change!). A
fascinating subject, and one that probably could (and likely will) be
the focus of more books as other writers decide to mine it.
No comments:
Post a Comment