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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Water: A Biography

Water: A Biography

Boccaletti, Giulio

Hardcover

General Political ScienceGeologyInternational Relations

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1524748234
ISBN13: 9781524748234
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: Sep 14 2021
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.60
Height: 1.50 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
Spanning millennia and continents, a revealing history that tackles the most important story of our time: our relationship with water in a world of looming scarcity (Kelly McEvers, NPR Host).

Far more than a biography of its nominal subject ... The book stands as a compelling history of civilization itself. --The Wall Street Journal Book Review

Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boc­caletti--honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Univer­sity of Oxford--shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civ­ilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made possible by sea-level changes from the last glacial melt, he incisively examines how this type of farming led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization.

We see with clarity how irrigation's structure informed social structure (inventions such as the calendar sprung from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of wells laid the groundwork for democracy; how the Greek and Roman experiences with water security resulted in systems of taxation; and how the modern world as we know it began with a legal framework for the development of water infrastructure.

Extraordinary for its monumental scope and piercing insightfulness, Water: A Biography richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to--and fundamental reliance on--the most elemental substance on earth.

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