Civilizations : culture, ambition, and the transformation of nature / Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

By:

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe

Material type:

TextPublication details: New York : Simon & Schuster, c2001.Description: 545 p. : 24 cmISBN:

9780743202497

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

Contents:

The itch to civilize -- 1. The helm of ice: ice worlds and tundra as human habitats -- 2. The death of Earth: adaptation and counteradaptation in deserts of sand -- 3. The sweepings of the wind: prairy and grassy savanna -- 4. The highway of civilizations: the eurasian steppe -- 5. The wild woods: postglacial and temperate woodland -- 6. Hearts of darkness: tropical lowlands -- 7. The lone and level sands: misleading cases in the Near East -- 8. Of shoes and rice: transcending environments of origin in China and India -- 9. The gardens of the clouds: the highland civilizations of the New World -- 10. The climb to paradise: the highland civilizations of the Old World -- 11. The allotments of the gods: small-islands civilizations -- 12. The view from the shore: the nature of seaboard civilizations -- 13. Chasing the monsoon: seaboard -- 14. The tradition of Ulysses: the Greek and Roman seabords -- 15. Almost the last environment: the rise of oceanic civilizations -- 16. Refloating Atlantis: the making of Atlantic civilization -- 17. The Atlantic and after: Atlantic supremacy and the global outlook.

Summary: Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written with extraordinary flair, Civilizations redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the nature of civilization. To the author, Oxford historian Felipe Fernádez-Armesto, a society's relationship to climate, geography, and ecology are paramount in determining its degree of success. "Unlike previous attempts to write the comparative history of civilizations," he writes, "it is arranged environment by environment, rather than period by period or society by society." Thus, for example, tundra civilizations of Ice Age Europe are linked with those of the Inuit of the Pacific Northwest, the Mississippi Mound Builders with the deforesters of eleventh-century Europe. Civilizations brilliantly connects the world of ecologist, geologist, and geographer with the panorama of cultural history.

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Holdings
Item type	Current library	Call number	Status	Barcode
Books	Marbella International University Centre Library	909 FER civ (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Available	10485

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The itch to civilize --
1. The helm of ice: ice worlds and tundra as human habitats --
2. The death of Earth: adaptation and counteradaptation in deserts of sand --
3. The sweepings of the wind: prairy and grassy savanna --
4. The highway of civilizations: the eurasian steppe --
5. The wild woods: postglacial and temperate woodland --
6. Hearts of darkness: tropical lowlands --
7. The lone and level sands: misleading cases in the Near East --
8. Of shoes and rice: transcending environments of origin in China and India --
9. The gardens of the clouds: the highland civilizations of the New World --
10. The climb to paradise: the highland civilizations of the Old World --
11. The allotments of the gods: small-islands civilizations --
12. The view from the shore: the nature of seaboard civilizations --
13. Chasing the monsoon: seaboard --
14. The tradition of Ulysses: the Greek and Roman seabords --
15. Almost the last environment: the rise of oceanic civilizations --
16. Refloating Atlantis: the making of Atlantic civilization --
17. The Atlantic and after: Atlantic supremacy and the global outlook.

Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written with extraordinary flair, Civilizations redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the nature of civilization.

To the author, Oxford historian Felipe Fernádez-Armesto, a society's relationship to climate, geography, and ecology are paramount in determining its degree of success. "Unlike previous attempts to write the comparative history of civilizations," he writes, "it is arranged environment by environment, rather than period by period or society by society." Thus, for example, tundra civilizations of Ice Age Europe are linked with those of the Inuit of the Pacific Northwest, the Mississippi Mound Builders with the deforesters of eleventh-century Europe.

Civilizations brilliantly connects the world of ecologist, geologist, and geographer with the panorama of cultural history.

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