Synopses & Reviews
How a seven-year cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history
In May 1315, it started to rain. It didnt stop anywhere in north Europe until August. Next came the four coldest winters in a millennium. Two separate animal epidemics killed nearly 80 percent of northern Europes livestock. Wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders, and two rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire destroyed all remaining farmland. After seven years, the combination of lost harvests, warfare, and pestilence would claim six million livesone eighth of Europes total population.
William Rosen draws on a wide array of disciplines, from military history to feudal law to agricultural economics and climatology, to trace the succession of traumas that caused the Great Famine. With dramatic appearances by Scotlands William Wallace, and the luckless Edward II and his treacherous Queen Isabella, historys best documented episode of catastrophic climate change comes alive, with powerful implications for future calamities.
Review
Praise for The Most Powerful Idea in the World
“A sneaky history - ostensibly about the origins of the steam engine, though actually about much more.. As someone who spun an eclectic history from small things in his previous book, Justinians Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe, Rosen is a natural and playful storyteller, and his digressions both inform the narrative and lend it an eccentric and engaging rhythm…offering a forceful argument in the debate, which has gone on for centuries, over whether patents promote innovation or retard it."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Wonderfully eclectic.... The author dismisses the more traditional explanations about why the industrial revolution began in Britain—such as an abundance of coal or the insatiable demands of the Royal Navy—concluding, instead, that it was Englands development of the patent system that was the decisive factor.... It is a plausible conclusion and Mr Rosen makes a powerful case.
--The Economist
“Brilliant… an entertaining narrative weaving together the clever characters, incremental innovations and historical context behind the engines that gave birth to our modern world…. Rosen has a facility for the telling anecdote and the quirky aside.”
-- Bill Gates in The Gates Notes &
The Annual Letter of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
"The book has a crackling energy to it, often as riveting as it is educational. Rosen, in pursuit of evidence, makes interesting, even exciting, such subjects as patent law from the Roman Tiberius on, technological innovation in ancient China and the role of practice in separating out accomplished performers from the 'merely good'.... The playfulness and invention evident in these descriptions carry over into chapters rich in detail and imbued with a sparkling intelligence."
--The Los Angeles Times
"Regardless of what one thinks of Rosen's core thesis, he is an able guide through some pretty dense scientific and intellectual thickets. And he has a knack for witty descriptions and analogies, which help the reader navigate the deeper waters."
--The Seattle Times
"What William Rosen neatly does with his book, subtitled 'a story of steam, industry, and invention' is to manage to make this hugely important topic -- this is, after all, the story of the formation of the modern world -- fresh and interesting...One of the things that makes this book so enjoyable is the detail of the research -- the author clearly really likes diving into obscure detail, then bringing it out in a way that intrigues...An excellent book that should be essential knowledge for all of us in the modern world."
--Popular Science
"Why Britain? What was peculiar to a smallish island in north-west Europe that turned it into the first industrial nation? Rosen isn't the first writer to attempt an answer, but I can think of no other book that combines so many aspects of the story so clearly and elegantly its scope and lively intelligence make it the best kind of popular account."
--Financial Times
"[A] fascinating, wide-ranging narrative...A staggering work of epistemological research."
Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Praise for Justinians Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe
"Don't charge William Rosen with lack of ambition. Instead of biography or the thin slice of the past that has become popular with history publishers, he presents us with no less than the foundations of the modern world, as built by a man and an insect. The result is largely successful and engaging."
--The Baltimore Sun
"...Rosen succeeds brilliantly. He writes what might be called champagne prose: it slips down quick and easy but carries a punch. He covers not just the centres but the extremities of knowledge: this book touches on gravity fields, early modern microscopes, late Roman cavalry tactics, and load patterns in the Hagia Sophia.... Sometimes, it is true, the trip resembles a driving holiday in Portugal - superb landscapes but almost no road signs - but the journey is always a fascinating one."
--The Telegraph
"As a feat of scholarship alone this book is extraordinary, but what really impresses is the sense of ease its author manifests in whatever subject he enters. It's as if he'd been granted the freedom of Late Antiquity at birth. Furthermore, he allows himself space; when a subject requires explanation, and that in turn requires digression, he grants both."
--The Independent
“Justinian's Flea is, among other things, a work of political, military, medical and cultural history. It may even have a reasonable claim to being a work of zoological history too.... Scholars may quibble with certain particulars but ordinary readers will be swept along by the strong current of Mr Rosen's good-natured erudition.”
--The Economist
"[An] impressive study of the bubonic plague and its impact on history."
--The Guardian
"Assertively modern in language and attitude, Rosens multi-disciplinary Byzantine history deals not only with fatal microbiology but also celebrates Justinians major achievements."
--The Times (London)
“Readers of Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond's grand narratives, will find this a welcome addendum.”
--Publishers Weekly
“Rigorous, highly informative history written with passion, panache and an appealing bit of attitude.”
--Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Review
“The 'Winter is coming' refrain from HBOs 'Game of Thrones' fits this story of medieval Europes great famine to a T.”
--New York Post
"A kink in Europes climate during the fourteenth century indirectly triggered a seven-year cataclysm that left six million dead, William Rosen reveals in this rich interweaving of agronomy, meteorology, economics and history. The Great Famine ended the explosion in agricultural productivity of the 400-year Medieval Warm Period, which affected mainly North Atlantic civilizations. Rosen deftly delineates the backstory and the perfect storm of heavy rains, hard winters, livestock epidemics, and war leading to the catastrophe."
--Nature
"Rosen... delights in the minutiae of history, down to the most fascinating footnotes. Here, the author delivers engrossing disquisitions on climate patterns and dynastic entanglements between England and Scotland (among others), and he posits that the decisive advent of cooler, wetter weather in the early 14th century signaled the beginning of the end of the medieval good times... A work that glows from the author's relish for his subject."
--Kirkus
Review
Praise for The Third Horseman
“A kink in Europes climate during the fourteenth century indirectly triggered a seven-year cataclysm that left six million dead, William Rosen reveals in this rich interweaving of agronomy, meteorology, economics and history.... Rosen deftly delineates the backstory and the perfect storm of heavy rains, hard winters, livestock epidemics, and war leading to the catastrophe.”
--Nature
“Rosen... delights in the minutiae of history, down to the most fascinating footnotes... Engrossing.... A work that glows from the authors relish for his subject.”
--Kirkus
“Rosen (The Most Powerful Idea in the World) argues persuasively that natural disasters are most catastrophic when humankinds actions give them a push. The depredations committed in battle by Englishmen and Scots were augmented by years of bad weather: the result was that people died in droves. The interactions Rosen describes have been studied but are seldom incorporated into popular history, and the author never overreaches in his conclusions, providing a well-grounded chronicle.... This book will appeal foremost to history lovers, but it should also interest anyone who enjoys a well-documented story.”
--Library Journal
“William Rosen is a good enough writer to hold interest and maintain the fraught relations between nature and politics as a running theme. He ends The Third Horseman with a stark observation: in some ways, global ecology is more precarious nowadays than it was in the 1300s.”
—Milwaukee Express
“Rosen is a terrific storyteller and engaging stylist; his vigorous recaps of famous battles and sketches of various colorful characters will entertain readers not unduly preoccupied by thematic rigor.... Rosens principal goal, however, is not to horrify us, but to make us think.... While vividly re-creating a bygone civilization, he invites us to look beyond our significant but ultimately superficial differences and recognize that we too live in fragile equilibrium with the natural world whose resources we recklessly exploit, and that like our medieval forebears we may well be vulnerable to ‘a sudden shift in the weather.”
—The Daily Beast
Praise for William Rosen
“Rosen is a natural and playful storyteller.”
—The New York Times
“Rosen has a facility for the telling anecdote and the quirky aside.”
—Bill Gates
“[Rosen] writes what might be called champagne prose: it slips down quick and easy but carries a punch.”
—The Telegraph (UK)
Synopsis
How a cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European historyyears before the Black Death In May 1315, it started to rain. For the seven disastrous years that followed, Europeans would be visited by a series of curses unseen since the third book of Exodus: floods, ice, failures of crops and cattle, and epidemics not just of disease, but of pike, sword, and spear. All told, six million livesone-eighth of Europes total populationwould be lost.
With a category-defying knowledge of science and history, William Rosen tells the stunning story of the oft-overlooked Great Famine with wit and drama and demonstrates what it all means for todays discussions of climate change.
About the Author
WILLIAM ROSEN, a former editor and publisher at Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, and The Free Press, is the author of Justinians Flea and The Most Powerful Idea in the World. He lives in New Jersey.