The Long Summer – Brian Fagan *****

Subtitled “how climate changed civilization”, The Long Summer is a fascinating trip into the past and the impact of the most recent periods of ice and global warming on the development of human civilization. Unlike Stephen Mithen’s huge After the Ice, Brian Fagan does not make the mistake of producing a book so long that it feels as if you have lived through an ice age. Fagan’s book is short enough to be readable, and though it covers a similar period in time, does so without going into so much mind-numbing detail that the reader loses the will to go on.

Although there’s plenty of scientific and historical fact in here, Fagan keeps us interested with an excellent narrative approach, whether he’s describing the experience of being tossed on a small boat in the Bay of Biscay, or of seeing the remarkable wall paintings of the Niaux caves in southern France.

Like Jared Diamond’s How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Fagan explores the fragility of civilization, but the context here is much better – we get a feeling for the relationship of the the cycles of history with the those of global climate, a much richer interaction than is suggested by simplistic eco-knee jerk reactions to the human impact on the planet.

The Long Summer spans archeology, climatology and the more scientific aspects of that demi-science sociology and does it very well.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...

Search This Blog