Books : Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization
Price: $33.90 as of 03/21/2010 12:16 EDT details
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 551.60902
EAN: 9780345408761
Edition: 1st American Ed
ISBN: 0345408764
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: February 01, 2000
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: February 01, 2000
Studio: Ballantine Books
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com Review:
Everybody knows the Dark Ages weren't really dark, right? Not so fast, counters archaeological journalist David Keys, maybe it's more than just a slightly judgmental metaphor. His book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World, based on years of careful research spanning five continents, argues that sometime in A.D. 535, a worldwide disaster struck and uprooted nearly every culture then extant. Given contemporary reports of the sun being blotted out or weakened for nearly a year and a half, followed by famine, drought, and plague, it's hard not to think that so many reports from all over the world must be related.
Keys shows a keen grasp of both the written historical record from Asia, Africa, and Europe and the archaeological evidence from the Americas, and tells many tales of great havoc destroying old empires and laying the ground for new ones. Rome may have fallen, but Spain, England, and France rose in its place, while farther east, Japan and China each unified and gained strength after the chaos. Could an enormous volcanic eruption have had such influence on the world as a whole, and could the same thing happen tomorrow? Catastrophe makes no predictions, but leaves the reader with a new sense of history, nature, and destiny. --Rob Lightner
Product Description:
It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world - essentially the modern world as we know it today - began to emerge.
In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago.
The Roman Empire, the greatest power in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, lost half its territory in the century following the catastrophe. During the exact same period, the ancient southern Chinese state, weakened by economic turmoil, succumbed to invaders from the north, and a single unified China was born. Meanwhile, as restless tribes swept down from the central Asian steppes, a new religion known as Islam spread through the Middle East. As Keys demonstrates with compelling originality and authoritative research, these were not isolated upheavals but linked events arising from the same cause and rippling around the world like an enormous tidal wave.
Keys's narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the "wasteland" that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known "Jewish empire" in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland.
In the book's final chapters, Keys delves into the mystery at the heart of this global catastrophe: Why did it happen? The answer, at once surprising and definitive, holds chilling implications for our own precarious geopolitical future. Wide-ranging in its scholarship, written with flair and passion, filled with original insights, Catastrophe is a superb synthesis of history, science, and cultural interpretation.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I generally enjoy the synthesis of different factors and how they influence history. And I don't disagree that such an event as the author proposed may have happened and produced various results. But this book seems to have one idea, which it cutely doesn't reveal until the final chapter, and doesn't allow for all the other factors that influence history (and climate). And as another reviewer mentioned, the phrases such as "almost certainly due to" tend to make me suspicious. I started skimming ... Read More
Rating: -
Overall, this is a good book with a provocative and convincing thesis. But, as part of his argument, Keys frequently refers to Mesoamerican populations falling victim to "contagious diseases." From what I understand, prior to the "Columbian Exchange" they didn't have any -- at least, nothing major (smallpox, chicken pox, measles, plague, etc.) since such diseases either evolved in the viral pools of domesticated animal populations (smallpox, chicken pox, etc.) or come from bacterial pools on other ... Read More
Rating:  -
Catastrophe by David Keys is a logical next book for Zechariah Sitchin fans wondering about what happened to Nibiru after 3,113 B.C. Everyone knows the "Sar" -- the 3,600 year period sacred to the Sumerians -- signified something important. But what was the big milestone in history for the return? David Keys has written all about the answer to the question, but he was not out to track down Sumerian mysteries. He went on a quest to find the origins of the Modern World as it rose from the ashes of ... Read More
Rating: -
David keys examines the dark ages and sees the foundations of our modern world, which, he says, emerged from a tremendous volcanic eruption 1500 years ago. The last section of the book is on this calamity, thought to have blocked out sunlight and changed climate around the globe, creating ecological and social conditions that promoted great changes.
The discussion of this volcanic event here is reasonably interesting. Keys also gives a fascinating description of how an asteroid impact ... Read More
Rating: -
This book has an intereting premise, that the world as we know it today developed in part from a volcanic eruption that shifted the balance of power.
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