cover image The Great Divide: 
Nature and Human Nature 
in the Old World and the New

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New

Peter Watson. Harper, $31.99 (640p) ISBN 978-0-06-167245-3

Watson, a former senior editor at the London Sunday Times, explores the radically different cultures and fates of the Eastern and Western hemispheres in this sweeping comparative history from the last Ice Age to the Columbian contact. His analysis spotlights gross environmental disparities: compared to the Old World, the Americas had a smaller land mass and population, a geographical layout that impeded cultural and technological exchange, a dearth of domesticable plants and animals and an unstable climate and terrain wracked by hurricanes, droughts, volcanoes, and earthquakes. But Watson reaches further—sometimes implausibly far—in linking physical and ecological conditions to ideology and religion; he contends that the New World’s frequent geoclimatic disasters provoked rites of human sacrifice to propitiate angry gods, and that the Old World’s experience with animal husbandry helped engender both the Judeo-Christian tradition and rationalism. Watson (The Caravaggio Conspiracy) integrates reams of multidisciplinary scholarship into an ambitious and stimulating unifying framework. Inevitably, some of his speculations feel forced, especially on the meanings of the New World’s bloodthirsty rituals and shamanistic jaguar deities, which feel like exotic enigmas beside the more familiar narrative of Old World progress. Still, like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, his grand-scale history contains fascinating insights at every turn. B&w illus.; maps. Agent: Robin Straus Agency. (July)