Civilizations / Felipe Fern�ndez-Armesto

London : Macmillan, 2000. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine cloth copy in an equally fine dust-wrapper, now mylar-sleeved. Particularly and surprisingly well-preserved; tight, bright, clean and especially sharp-cornered. Physical description; xx, 636 p., [24] p. of plates : ill. (some col.), 1 col. map, ports. ; 24 cm. Notes; Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents; The itch to civilize : civilizations and civilization -- pt. 1. The waste land : desert, tundra, ice -- The helm of ice : ice worlds and tundra as human habitats -- The death of earth : adaptation and counteradaptation in deserts of sand -- pt. 2. Leaves of grass : uncultivable grasslands -- The sweepings of the wind : prairie and grassy savanna -- The highway of civilizations : the Eurasian steppe -- pt. 3. Under the rain : civilization in tropical lowlands and postglacial forests -- The wild woods : postglacial and temperate woodland -- Hearts of darkness : tropical lowlands -- pt. 4. The shining fields of mud : alluvial soils in drying climates -- The lone and level sands : misleading cases in the Near East -- Of shoes and rice : transcending environments of origin in China and India -- pt. 5. The mirrors of sky : civilizing highlands -- The gardens of the clouds : highland civilizations of the new world -- The climb to paradise : highland civilizations of the old world -- pt. 6. The water margins : civilizations shaped by the sea -- The allotments of the gods : small-island civilizations -- The view from the shore : the nature of seaboard civilizations -- Chasing the monsoon : seaboard civilizations of maritime Asia -- The tradition of Ulysses : the Greek and Roman seaboards -- pt. 7. Breaking the waves : the domestication of the oceans -- Almost the last environment : the rise of oceanic civilizations -- Refloating Atlantis : the making of Atlantic civilization -- The Atlantic and after : Atlantic supremacy and the global outlook. Summary; This enormous project is based on the premise that civilizations are the product of their environment. With that, Fernandez-Arnesto looks at cultures of the desert, the tundra and ice, then to the more obvious civilizations of alluvial flood plains, the highlands, maritime civilizations and finally civilizations of travel, migration and expansion. This is a work of massive cross referencing juxtaposing the maritime civilizations of Japan and Northern Africa or the mountain civilizations of New Guinea and Tibet. The effect is to suggest that civilization can happen anywhere - that no one environment is uniquely conducive, or that no one race or people are more productive than another. Subjects; Civilization � History. World history.