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

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.