A Short History of Progress
- Publisher
- House of Anansi Press Inc
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2004
- Category
- Cultural, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Civilization
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780887847066
- Publish Date
- Oct 2004
- List Price
- $19.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9780887848438
- Publish Date
- Oct 2004
- List Price
- $10.99
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Where to buy it
Out of print
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Description
Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water -- the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?
In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.
About the author
RONALD WRIGHT is an award-winning historian, essayist, and the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction published in sixteen languages and more than forty countries. His 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, was a #1 national bestseller, won the Libris Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year, and was the basis for the Martin Scorsese–produced documentary Surviving Progress. His other bestselling nonfiction books include the BC Book Prize–winning history What Is America?; Stolen Continents, which won the Gordon Montador Award; and Among the Maya. His first novel, A Scientific Romance, won the 1997 David Higham Prize for Fiction and was a Globe and Mail, Sunday Times, and New York Times book of the year. Wright contributes criticism to the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. He lives in British Columbia.
Other titles by
A Short History of Progress
Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
The Gold Eaters
A Novel
Cut Stones and Crossroads
A Journey in the Two Worlds of Peru
Stolen Continents
Conquest and Resistance in the Americas
What Is America?
A Short History of the New World Order
Cut Stones and Crossroads
An Illustrated Short History of Progress
Henderson's Spear
A Scientific Romance
A Novel