Customer Reviews

Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations

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As a professional meteorologist, routinely faced with questions on El Nino and La Nina, I found this book both interesting and enjoyable. Like other Fagan books, it was well written and easy to read.

Meteorologists and Climatologists will enjoy this book, with simple and historical treatments of Monsoons, ENSO, and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Those with a weather interest will enjoy this book, especially the first 100 page or so.

Finally, the book connects the climatological phenomena with civilizations. The climate impacted all civilizations and may have weakened them, contributing the their evolution or demise. These concepts are supported in the text and fit well with the concept on human evolution in Ian Tattersall's book "Becoming Human-Evolution and human uniqueness".

This book supplements some of the ice age material in the earlier Fagan book, "The Great Journey-The peopling of ancient America". This book is both easy to read and understand, well worth the cost.

According to Brian Fagan, the phenomenon known as El Nino has abruptly entered our collective awareness. That's a good thing, since its effects have a long, and often disastrous reach. It is not, he contends, the only issue to consider in climate impact. It has been "over-hyped" by media. The issues go beyond freak storms and harsh droughts. Humans have confronted weather throughout their evolutionary history. How society copes with global weather impact is Fagan's real concern. He's collected a wealth of information in this well written account. There is much to learn from this book, which includes some intriguing
surprises.

Comfortably divided into three major themes, Fagan opens with an explanation of El Nino's "discovery". What had seemed to be freak weather events proved to have an underlying pattern. The El Nino Southern Oscillation [ENSO] is an eastward moving body of warm Pacific Ocean water. The warmth blocks the flow of the Humboldt Current moving from Antarctica along the South American coast. Fish die or depart, with birds duplicating the pattern. Fagan stresses that the effect of that warm cell has global reach and has roots deep in time. Pharonic Egypt felt its impact, perhaps contributing, if not causing, social upheaval and even a new philosophy of rule by those absolute rulers.

How society and its rulers deal with abrupt weather change is the focus of the second part. As an anthropologist, Fagan is conversant with ancient societies. He examines the Andean Moche people who engineered extensive irrigation systems to catch feeble rainfall. With El Nino, rainfall changes from feeble to fabulous and the Moche watched their canals being flushed away. The following famines broke the power of the Moche aristocracy and the culture collapsed. A similar fate occurred to the Maya, whose rigid social pattern prevented them from coping with crop loss. However, the Anasazi people of the American Southwest, long skilled in desert agriculture, had a different method for dealing with drought. A loose, flexible society encouraged sharing of resources, then departure when the soil failed. Fagan overturns the long-held view that the Anasazi "mysteriously" disappeared. He contends they simply dispersed.

In the final section, Fagan relates some historical climate events such as The Little Ice Age and the Sahel drought. He examines the short-sighted policies that have exacerbated the human impact of such events. Over expansion in good years leaves no flexibility for addressing the needs of bad times. Governments must avoid superficial solutions in the face of knowing climate will generate surprises. Better planning scenarios are required for land occupation and use. Although it's been said before, Fagan urges better understanding of what is sustainable. That, of course, means more research and the application of political will derived from its results. While that may curtail some short-term profit gains and force revision of some cultural noms, it's the survival of the species that's at stake.

Fagan's easy writing style mustn't undercut the value of this book. Enhanced with good maps tied nicely to the text and an outstanding bibliography make this book required reading. Weather, after all, is part of the human condition everywhere. We all need to understand better its impact, and cheap jokes about El Nino aren't part of that comprehension. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

To be honest, I enjoyed this book far more than I anticipated. Fagan is a smart archaelogist, and does not reduce human history to weather; rather he shows how weather can influence politics, religion, agriculture, and economics. Fagan could have made this point more clearly: weather can sometimes be influential; it's not determinative.

Fagan offers a good direction for archaelogists and historians to head; more serious works would do well to take up Fagan's challenge to analyze historical weather patterns. It'll be a tough go, but well-worth the trouble.

One of the book's strongest chapters is Chapter 11, showing how French colonial rule in the Sahel helped to impoverish and starve peoples living there, while increasing desertification. Here, he echoes the theme of the vastly superior _Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino and the Making of the Third World_. This latter book, by Mike Davis, is one of the most important books of recent decades. Where Fagan fails to consider structural inequalities and human suffering as a result of El Ninos, Davis fully succeeds. The books make for some nice contrasts (I assigned both to my college students). Turn to Davis, after you've had fun with Fagan.

This was a wonderful treatment of the effects of weather/climate on ancient civilizations. I found the thesis rather intriguing, as I had not considered how compelling might be the effects of major changes in the weather regime on a culture. One is quite aware of local effects of the weather, especially when it is severe. The news media make the statistics of every flood, hurricaine and draught the subject of international interest. Certainly the effects of major climatic disasters like the 7 lean years of the Bible and the Dust Bowl years of US history are familiar. Professor Fagan makes clearer the political and social impact of El Ninos world wide in antiquity as well.

Never has one work tied together so much world history with the geologic and geographical weather record to create such a compelling case for the power of El Nino, the "christmas child." Reading this book made me much more aware of the subtle, power of nature working "behind the scenes" The author held my interest throughout and left me contemplating other world events that must also have been influenced by El Nino and La Nina.

The relationship between climate change and human history is an important subject given our current epoch, however, Fagan's 1999 book book does not give it true justice. Fagan tends to drone on giving example after example before he draws tentative conclusions, which, as other reviewers have noted, can get tedious. One problem here is that he is writing as if his audience are historians or meteorologists, which most of us aren't. Hence, the excurisons into ancient Egypt or mid millenium Peru need more exposition to set the time and place, and fewer examples of this or that ruler.

On a related note, this book could benefit enormously with more illustrations and better illustrations. The few illustrations that are present are, to say the least, elemental. Moreover, they don't appear to be located near the text that mentions them, and usually they don't contain most of the subject matter that he is discussing. This type of book needs good illustrations and lots of them.

There is merit to the book, and if you can get past the problems listed above, there is some valuable information here. But this is hardly the place to begin if you are interested in this important subject.

As a fan of Fagan's work with an interest in the effect of climate on history I have read many of the authors books. This one, like the others is well researched and documented, however it lacks the energy and verve of Little Ice Age ; Big Chill (by far Fagan's best work). Granted the Little Ice Age had a far greater impact on a larger scale but this book gets a bit tedious after awhile, I actually never completed reading it.

This book was required for a climatology class I took. I was very surprised to find myself reading ahead of scheduled readings because it was so interesting! It is a very quick read and just fascinating!

This book is an excellent complement to David Key's book on "Catastrophe", and I found it a worthwhile fast read.

It has one really big core idea that ties environmental, political, economic, and cultural readings together--it explores the inter-relationship between sustainability of any given society within the constraints of the time and the legitimacy of the government or other form of political organization.

Two things appear to help: long-term vision on the part of the leader, and whatever it takes to maintain the people's faith in their leadership.

The author concludes with an overview of where we stand today, and draws attention to the especially dangerous combination of overpopulation, global warming, and rapid climate changes occurring all at once.

For me, this book combined an overview of how seriously we must take ocean currents and related climate changes; and how important it is that our leaders understand these issues and take long-term views that add stability and sustainability in the face of varying challenges to our well-being.

I read Fagan's "Time Detectives: How Archaeologists Use Modern Technology to Unravel The Secrets of the Past" and found it to be rather simplistic and not very engrossing. However, I found Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations to be much more interesting. It starts by giving a history of some of the early scientists and weather watchers who recorded their observations and began to notice wide area, even global patterns and cycles. These were the first meteorologists and climatologists. He goes on to describe how historical records of climate change were pieced together from ice cores, sea bottom mud cores and tree rings to show that the globe has gone through several cycles of cooling and warming over the last 15-20 millenia. He then goes on to link cyclical patterns such as El Nino to very wet weather on the North American West Coast and corresponding drought in Brazil's northeast. Finally, he ties some of the more severe incidences of these cyclical patterns to the collapse of civilizations in North America, South America and Africa.