The Earth Transformed: An Untold History
Peter Frankopan
(Bloomsbury, £30)
HISTORY books are getting bigger—not only in size (although this book does run to almost 700 pages), but in ambition and scope. As are Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Peter Frankopan’s own 2015 blockbuster, The Silk Roads, this is a broad-brush, global history; it’s packed with relevant facts and detail, but also enables the reader to understand the bigger picture.
The subtitle—An Untold History —suggests a totally new approach, although many of the specific examples included in the book, such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, have previously been covered by historians. However, this is certainly the first time they have been brought together into a single narrative, each example set in its wider context.
The danger of this approach is that one can easily fall between two stools: becoming bogged down with the specific detail, yet at the same time failing to create a coherent story on a grand
