Books by Sunil Amrith
“It shows that you can’t tell history—whether it’s the history of the past 50 years or the past 500 years or the past 1000 years—without paying attention to the role of the environment. The environment is not something that’s happening on the side of history. They’re intertwined, and you can’t separate them out. The book shows this really compellingly. It illustrates how events that we might think about as completely unrelated were connected through the environment. For instance, Amrith mentions research suggesting that the European invasion of the Americas that started in 1492 with Columbus contributed to the Little Ice Age that lowered temperatures all over the world. Perhaps the freezing over of the Thames in the 1600s was caused in part by the conquest of the Aztec empire on the other side of the Atlantic a century earlier.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize
Rebecca Earle, Historian
Interviews where books by Sunil Amrith were recommended
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1
The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
by W. Jeffrey Bolster -
2
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
by Kate Brown -
3
Ecological Imperialism
by Alfred Crosby -
4
The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World
by John F. Richards -
5
The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938
by Myrna I. Santiago
The best books on Environmental History, recommended by John R McNeill
The best books on Environmental History, recommended by John R McNeill
Environmental history is the study of the relationship between society and the natural world—both in terms of human impacts on the environment, and the constraints placed upon cultures by the landscapes they live in. Here, John R. McNeill, a pioneer of the field, recommends five of the best environmental history books with ambition, engaging prose, and heft.
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1
How to End a Story: Collected Diaries
by Helen Garner -
2
The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years
by Sunil Amrith -
3
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin
by Sue Prideaux -
4
The Story of a Heart
by Rachel Clarke -
5
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
by Benjamin Nathans -
6
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
by Stephen Witt
Award-Winning Nonfiction Books of 2025, recommended by Sophie Roell
Award-Winning Nonfiction Books of 2025, recommended by Sophie Roell
It’s a golden age for nonfiction, with books on a range of important topics written in an accessible way. As 2025 draws to a close, Five Books editor Sophie Roell takes us through some of the books that won prestigious nonfiction book prizes this year, and what they can tell us about the world we live in.
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1
The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years
by Sunil Amrith -
2
The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin
by Lucy Ash -
3
The Golden Road
by William Dalrymple -
4
Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance
by Bronwen Everill -
5
Sick of It: The Global Fight for Women's Health
by Sophie Harman -
6
Sound Tracks: A Musical Detective Story
by Graeme Lawson
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize, recommended by Rebecca Earle
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize, recommended by Rebecca Earle
To be shortlisted for the annual British Academy Book Prize, books have to be both rigorously researched and highly readable. Historian Rebecca Earle, chair of the 2025 judging panel, talks us through the books that made this year’s shortlist, from an environmental history that opens with Genghis Khan and the Mongol expansion to a ‘musical detective story’ that investigates the sounds made by our ancestors down the millennia.
