The Earth Transformed: An Untold History

"One thing that’s great about history books at the moment is the burgeoning of the world history genre. History as learned at school is traditionally national history, taught to create good, patriotic citizens, not understand the story of humanity. Peter Frankopan is a professor of global history at the University of Oxford who already took a much broader approach in his bestselling book, The Silk Roads . His latest, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History , takes an even wider approach, telling the whole of human history through the lens of the natural world. As you would expect from a book that covers several millennia, The Earth Transformed is long (650 pages), but Frankopan is an excellent writer so it’s easy to read. You can dip into the chapters and periods that particularly interest you (e.g. “The Medieval Warm Period c900-c1250”). Not surprisingly, given it’s about climate change (past, not future), science inevitably plays a big role in the book. As you’re reading it, Frankopan makes you aware of how much advances in science (including data science) can contribute to understanding history in general. There are at least two new books out related to the Soviet Union. The story of its collapse has come to the forefront again as we try to understand Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “What came to an end was not history itself, but an empire whose time had run out,” writes Karl Schlögel, the German historian, in his newly translated book, The Soviet Century . Schlögel first visited the Soviet Union in 1966 and has travelled all around. It’s a quirky book, a huge and highly knowledgeable catalogue of the Soviet Union’s various parts—from flea markets to the gulag at Kolyma. There’s also an interesting and readable new biography of George Kennan (1904-2005)—the American diplomat who was the brains behind the ‘containment’ policy towards the Soviet Union after World War II. Kennan was a Russophile—he cried while watching The Cherry Orchard and hoped to write a biography of Chekhov. He was in Moscow amidst the enormous optimism about US-Soviet relations in 1934, when Stalin kissed the US ambassador on the lips. That soon fell apart and Kennan was again in Moscow during Stalin’s show trials, translating most of the trial transcripts in 1937. Some of those executed were friends and he was emotionally devastated. “The effect was never to leave me,” he wrote. According to biographer Frank Costigliola, while Kennan advocated containment in 1946-7, he spent most of his subsequent life criticizing it, but the American foreign policy establishment didn’t want to know. If you’re interested in China, a new book to read is Red Memory by Tania Branigan , a journalist for the Guardian . It’s about the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and when or if the Chinese people can come to terms with the terrible things that happened. As many as two million people were killed and a further 36 million hounded, largely on the basis of ‘thoughtcrimes.’ The book explains what the Cultural Revolution was while mixing in personal stories and its relevance to current Chinese politics. As Branigan writes, “It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution….In some regards it echoes Stalinist purges, but with enthusiastic mass participation.”"