Product Description: In Throwing Fire, historian Alfred W. Crosby looks at hard, accurate throwing and the manipulation of fire as unique human capabilities. Humans began throwing rocks in prehistory and then progressed to javelins, atlatls, bows and arrows...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A spirited survey of humanity's historical and modern efforts to harness sun-based energy reveals how the human race's successes have hinged directly on effective uses of sun energy, cites rates in pollution and global warming as warning signs of fossil fuel limits, and makes optimistic predictions about future innovations. 13,000 first printing.

Product Description: People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world--North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain because in many cases they were achieved by using firearms against spears...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Between August 1918 and March 1919 the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives, more people than those perished in the fighting of the First World War. It proved fatal to at least a half-million Americans...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Thirty years ago, Alfred Crosby published a small work that illuminated a simple point, that the most important changes brought on by the voyages of Columbus were not social or political, but biological in nature. The book told the story of how 1492 sparked the movement of organisms, both large and small, in both directions across the Atlantic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Amazon.com Review: The Measure of Reality is the third book in a series in which Alfred Crosby, a noted historian, asks how it is that Western European societies could have conquered so much of the world in the space of a few generations. The answer, he finds, is in certain agricultural and technological techniques...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Suggests biological reasons for the expanision of Europeans into new lands around the world and looks at changing historical ecosystems

Documents the effects of the deadly Spanish Influenza which swept along the United States' coasts during the last months of World War I.

Product Description: The best thing about this book is its overarching thesis, the concept of a Columbian exchange. This provocative device permits Crosby to shape a lot of familiar and seemingly unrelated data into a fresh synthesis. . . . The implications of this interplay between novel biological and social forces are fascinating...read more