Hailed as an arresting (Lawrence Klepp New Criterion) account Nature's Mutiny chronicles the
great climate crisis of the seventeenth century that totally transformed Europe's social and
political fabric. Best-selling historian Philipp Blom reveals how a new radically altered
Europe emerged out of the Little Ice Age that diminished crop yields across the continent
forcing thousands to flee starvation in the countryside to burgeoning urban centers and even
froze London's Thames upon which British citizens erected semipermanent frost fairs with
bustling kiosks taverns and brothels. Highlighting how politics and culture also changed
drastically Blom evokes the era's most influential artists and thinkers who imagined
groundbreaking worldviews to cope with environmental cataclysm. As we face a climate crisis of
our own Blom's prodigious synthesis delivers a sharply-focused lesson for the twenty-first
century: the profound effects of just a few degrees of climate change can alter the course of
civilization forever (Laurence A. Marschall Natural History).
