PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Occasionally it feels a bit second-hand. A quotation (1898) from the illustrious US national park advocate John Muir, for example, is sourced from a book about hiking, nudism and nature conservation in Germany. On the whole, though, The Earth Transformed is a superb synthesis of the findings of a bevy of books and bewildering number of specialist articles ... The crash course Frankopan took to get up to speed with the latest scholarship, while hugely impressive, undercuts the purported untold-ness of environmental and climatic approaches to the past ... Frankopan has done the sterling, even heroic job of making readily available much of the bountiful harvest of research in climate and environmental history ... In an effort to explain how we arrived at our current quandary, Peter Frankopan begins and ends with (rather hackneyed) images of earthly paradise and paradise lost, referencing John Milton’s epic poem and the Book of Genesis.
