This work abandons the conventional distinctions between history and science. Diamond focuses on what ancient people were endowed with in the way of land, animals and plants, and on the confrontations between less and more advanced people to see how this led to today's inequalities.

Talks about the mysterious collapse of past civilizations - and what this means for the future. Bringing together evidence from many sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, this book shows how unlike our ancestors we can benefit from our knowledge of the past.

This narrative tells how Irish monks and scribes saved classical and religious heritage by copying the manuscripts of writers such as Homer and Aristotle, while libraries on the continent were lost forever.

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. This work argues that this modern predicament is as old as civilisation.

The classic international bestseller -- a marvellously exciting and stimulating look at the emergence and development of Western civilisation

Freud's epoch-making insights revolutionized our perception of the self, forming the foundation for psychoanalysis; here he presents his theory of an innate 'death drive' - arguing that civilisation distorts natural aggression to impose a terrible burden of guilt upon us.

Picturing a future of accelerated conflict between civilizations threatening to dominate world politics, this classic study of the post-Cold War situation argues that an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war.

The Problem of Civilization.

Showing how the Jews changed the history of the human race, this book reveals the critical change that made Western civilisation possible. Full of stories, insights, and humour, it is an exploration of the origins of some of our oldest and closely held beliefs.

A survey of the civilizations of the modern world in terms of the broad sweep and continuities of history. It is written from a consciously anti-enthnocentric approach.

Golding's best-known novel is the story of a group of boys who, after a plane crash, set up a fragile community on a previously uninhabited island. As memories of home recede and the blood from frenzied pig-hunts arouses them, the boys' childish fear turns into something deeper and more primitive.

This, the second volume in the Endgame series, examines mankind's means of resistance.

'Every Scot should read it. Scotland now has the lively, provocative and positive history it deserves.' Irvine Welsh, Guardian A dramatic and intriguing history of how Scotland produced the institutions, beliefs and human character that have made the West into the most powerful culture in the world.

Looks to areas of the world that are unoccupied and speaks to experts in fields ranging from nuclear physics to archaeology. This book reveals how the natural world would react to our disappearance and wrestles with some of the key concerns of our time to offer a glimpse of the legacy of our existence on the planet.

Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilisation. Today's converging energy, environmental, economic and political stresses could cause a breakdown of national and global order. Yet, perhaps breakdown can create opportunities for the bold reform of our society and open up a way for the renewal of planet Earth. Taking a journey from the collapse of the Roman empire to the devastation of the

More than just a poignant memoir of a harrowingly abusive childhood, this book relates the extraordinary journey of one man striving to save his own spirit and our planet's. Comparing his physically and sexually abusive father's destruction of his family with humankind's systematic destruction of civilization, Derrick Jensen tells a story about the hope for regeneration in a landscape of human ...

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free.

The Earth's climate has always been in flux: glacial periods and warm ones have slowly and relentlessly alternated for millennia. But the period of global warming of the last 15,000 years is without precedent, and it set the conditions which enabled civilization to arise. It is our 'long summer'.