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A review by joshisreading
Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom
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.