Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (New York: Viking, 2012).
Elizabeth A. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (New York: Hill & Wan,g, 2014).
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014) ("[F]or two and a half million years, there's been no advantage in being able to deal with extra heat, since temperatures never got much warmer than they are right now. In the ups and downs of the Pleistocene, we are at the crest of an up." "To find carbon dioxide levels (and therefore, ultimately, global temperatures) higher than today's requires going back a long way, perhaps as far as the mid-Miocene century, CO2 levels could reach a level not seen since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. Whether species still possess the features that allowed their ancestors to thrive in that ancient, warmer world is, at this point, impossible to say...." "if evolution works the way it usually does,' Silman said, 'then the extinction scenario--we don't call it extinction, we talk about it as "biotic attrition," a nice euphemism--well, it starts to look apoclytic'." Id. at 171-172.).
Martin Meredith, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014).
Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Empires and Encounters, 1350-1750 (A History of the World) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2015) (From "Europe and the Atlantic World": "Academically trained lawyers represented a new, up-and-coming group who, acting in the service of popes and kings, had a vested interest in increasing their power. For unlike many of their aristocratic and ecclesiastical; predecessors in the service of princes, they did not lead an independent existence; rather, they were completely reliant on their paymasters for their position and advancement. While on the one had this does represent the beginnings of the modern monopoly of lawyers as the state class, on the other the continuing decentralized structure of the political word also facilitated the growth of bodies of royal lawyers with a strong claim on autonomous status in England, France, and Spain. Sometimes, these groups even dared gainsay the monarch on the question of what benefited the cause of revolutionary resistance to the crown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively." Id. at 735, 814-815.).
Pat Shipman, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2015).
