Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

Amid the proliferation of climate change literature, Ruth Morgan's Climate Change and International History stands out. In this readable and engaging work, Morgan has succeeded in the ambitious task of parsing a massive literature spanning the history of science, environmental politics, and international history to demonstrate how climate science and international events coproduced one another, both facilitating and constraining contemporary policy responses. Morgan devotes specific attention to the meanings, uses of, and contests over climate science and policies following World War II. Eight chronologically ordered chapters each open with a number--the rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide--a nod to Morgan's conclusion that the focus on climate change as a problem to be understood, governed, and solved by technical experts and international institutions has both under- and overestimated the roles of those actors while enabling other actors to "invoke and enroll" climate change for other ends, including environmental justice and economic development. Up-to-date and richly sourced, this will be required reading for this reviewer's climate politics and governance students, and will appeal to those in political science, environmental studies, and science and technology studies programs.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers.

The Earth Transformed is an engaging and insightful work examining the centrality of climate to global history. Frankopan (global history, Univ. of Oxford, UK) covers the entirety of human history, successfully using a Big History framework to explain how the environment has been a constant in shaping world history. Such a sweeping overview can have its limitations, but by focusing on climate Frankopan provides specific examples that provide depth as well as a truly global scope. Indeed, although many environmental histories explain how humanity has altered, exploited, or damaged the environment, climate offers a comprehensive approach without avoiding humanity's role in changing the Earth. The work begins by exploring environmental factors in human evolution, followed by the emergence of societies, agriculture, cities, religions, and empires. These earlier chapters are particularly useful given how much scholarship is dedicated to the modern period. The second half of the book examines topics after 1500, throughout which Frankopan retains a strong global dimension. The book is meticulously researched; however the endnotes are not included in the published work but are compiled on a companion website.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

This fascinating study traces the history of viewing events as caused primarily by weather and climate. Livingstone (emer., Queen's Univ. Belfast, UK) provides the context, development, and resonance (past and present) of climate determinism from the perspectives of medicine, psychology, economics, and warfare. He accomplishes this by analyzing the writings of seminal exponents of the influence of climate, such as Hippocrates, Ibn Khaldun, Montesquieu, and Ellsworth Huntington (inter alios), as well as those dubious of such simplistic explanations, such as Sorokin, Boas, and Durkheim. The determinists were/are very successful in having their views both accepted and concretized into policies connected with European imperialism, eugenics, American slavery, immigration, and the current concerns over climate change. Two very common themes highlighted throughout the book are the putative divide between temperate and tropical locales, and the interconnectedness of the various climate-deterministic perspectives. For example, one argument supposed that the ease of tropical life encouraged Indigenous laziness which, coupled with the sameness of the hot weather and loose morals, begged for colonizers from a temperate zone whose climate variability inexorably produced both efficiency and morality. The author asseverates that reductionist explanations ignore complexity and remove moral accountability from human decisions.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.