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joshisreading's review
4.0
I liked this book more than I thought I would. What won me over were the many vignettes the author provided to show the myriad ways the Little Ice Age changed European life. Some of these go seemingly way off course, which isn’t all bad— I enjoyed the broad exposure of topics presented in little snippets. But the extended and repeated discussions of Enlightenment philosophy felt disjointed from what I understood to be an environmental history (but I did love the chapter-length slam of Voltaire towards the end). All in all, I appreciated the opportunity to think about some of these known historical events within the broader context of climate change and not as individual threads.
dangerousnerd's review
informative
slow-paced
2.25
My main issue with this book is that it doesn’t support its thesis strongly at all. His central argument is that the small ice age ushered in a new period of marked change because of the change in climate. Instead, what we get is a series of barely related facts about a bunch of stuff that happened during the period but without any central thread linking them to climate change. Interesting, sure, but the title is a misnomer at best and misleading at worst. This book has barely anything to do with the climate and the social change brought therefrom.
mverdoorn's review against another edition
4.0
While very interesting, this was more of a cultural rather than scientific book about how the Little Ice Age impacted Europe.