PETER FRANKOPAN is professor of global history at Oxford University. He is the author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, and The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World. He lives in Oxford.
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023: BBC NEWS, SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE,
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"An essential epic that runs from the dawn of time to, oh, six
o’clock yesterday."
—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
"Thanks to Frankopan and the specialists he cites, the triumphalist
procession of steles and slabs and coins that have formed the
building blocks of history will give way to a deeper consideration
of what constitutes a historical source....Again and again the
hindsight that Frankopan exploits so intelligently forces us to
look afresh at things we thought we knew."
—Christopher de Bellaigue, The New York Review of Books
"Frankopan has brought all of this scholarly work together into a
massive book that is comprehensive, well-informed, and fascinating.
It has the intellectual weight and dramatic force of a
tsunami....This is an endlessly fascinating book, an easy read on
an important issue."
—Gerard DeGroot, The Times (London)
"Frankopan shows you how everything fits together...Vast, learned
and timely work...The Earth Transformed is Sapiens for
grown-ups....It holds lessons for a world grappling with rapid
climate change caused by human industry."
—Dan Jones, The Sunday Times
"A dazzling compendium of global research....The value of this book
is an act of deep understanding, recognising not only
scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are
epiphenomena—not dominators of the Earth but products of
it."
—Adam Nicolson, Spectator
"The author succeeds in mastering a seemingly impossible challenge,
distilling an immense mass of historical sources, scientific data,
and modern scholarship that span thousands of years and the entire
globe into an epic and spellbinding story. Humanity has transformed
the Earth: Frankopan transforms our understanding of history."
—Walter Scheidel, Financial Times
"Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural
disasters escalate, our environmental crisis feels difficult to
predict and understand. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when
past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have met with
catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and scientific
research, The Earth Transformed will reframe the way we look at our
future."
—JP Faber, Coral Gables Magazine
"All historians aiming to tell a narrative face the problem of when
exactly to start it. Only Peter Frankopan would go back 2.5 billion
years to the Great Oxidation Event."
—Tom Holland, author of Dominion
"Frankopan demonstrates an impressive mastery of anthropological,
historical, and meteorological literature, and his scrupulously
evenhanded analysis carefully notes uncertainties in scientific and
historical evidence. Elegant and cogently argued, this illuminates
an age-old and urgently important dynamic."
—Publishers Weekly, starred
"A scholarly assessment of the long-standing human habit of
altering the environment to increasingly devastating
consequences....The author negotiates the difficult matter of
environmental determinism well....A deep, knowledgeable dive into
environmental history."
—Kirkus
"Mapping historical, anthropological, and economic narratives
against mountains of climate data, Frankopan correlates periods of
instability to shifts in weather patterns, ocean currents, and
seismic events. And if the human species has frequently survived
existential peril—the Black Death, the Little Ice Age, volcanic
mega-eruptions—the threats to our collective future are massive and
unprecedented....Propelled by Frankopan’s global scope and
interdisciplinary legwork, the resulting synthesis is ambitious,
nervous, and impressive."
—Booklist
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