Product details
Biographical note
RONALD WRIGHT is a prize-winning novelist, historian, and essayist, published in ten languages. His nonfiction includes the number-one bestseller Stolen Continents, winner of the Gordon Montador Award and chosen as a book of the year by the Independent and the Sunday Times. His first novel, A Scientific Romance, won the 1997 David Higham Prize for Fiction and was chosen a book of the year by the Globe and Mail, the Sunday Times, and the New York Times.
The author sifts the findings of archaeology and anthropology with thoughtful grace to build a potent argument.
* Guardian *
A compelling work of distilled wisdom.
* The Times *
Rarely have I read a book that is so gripping, so immediate and so important to our times. Jared Diamond will be jealous.
- Robyn Williams,
Ronald Wright is both trained academic and an acclaimed novelist and he has used these skills to page-turning effect in this work of non-fiction.
* Morning Star *
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 by driving a whole herd over a cliff had made too much.
Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century´s runaway growth has placed a murderous burden on the planet.
A Short History of Progress argues that this modern predicament is as old as civilisation. Only by understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated since the Stone Age can we recognise the inherent dangers, and, with luck, and wisdom, shape its outcome.
Have we learnt the lessons of the past - or will we be next? Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to civilisations which fell victim to their own success: from Easter Island's monolithic wilderness to the perpetual silence of the Mayan ruins and ultimately to today's melting ice caps
and growing ozone hole, the cycle has continually repeated itself across the years.
"Unfailingly provocative and scarily persuasive." Scotsman
"The author sifts the findings of archaeology and anthropology with thoughtful grace to build a potent argument." Guardian
"I was thoroughly shaken up by Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress, a brilliant analysis of everything humanity has done to ruin itself down the ages." Jan Morris, Independent
"Wise, timely and brilliant." Globe and Mail
The author sifts the findings of archaeology and anthropology with thoughtful grace to build a potent argument.
* Guardian *
A compelling work of distilled wisdom.
* The Times *
Rarely have I read a book that is so gripping, so immediate and so important to our times. Jared Diamond will be jealous.
- Robyn Williams,
Ronald Wright is both trained academic and an acclaimed novelist and he has used these skills to page-turning effect in this work of non-fiction.
* Morning Star *
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 by driving a whole herd over a cliff had made too much.
Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century´s runaway growth has placed a murderous burden on the planet.
A Short History of Progress argues that this modern predicament is as old as civilisation. Only by understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated since the Stone Age can we recognise the inherent dangers, and, with luck, and wisdom, shape its outcome.
Have we learnt the lessons of the past - or will we be next? Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to civilisations which fell victim to their own success: from Easter Island's monolithic wilderness to the perpetual silence of the Mayan ruins and ultimately to today's melting ice caps
and growing ozone hole, the cycle has continually repeated itself across the years.
"Unfailingly provocative and scarily persuasive." Scotsman
"The author sifts the findings of archaeology and anthropology with thoughtful grace to build a potent argument." Guardian
"I was thoroughly shaken up by Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress, a brilliant analysis of everything humanity has done to ruin itself down the ages." Jan Morris, Independent
"Wise, timely and brilliant." Globe and Mail