Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear shows the intimate relationship between natural disaster and political connivery in Los Angeles. Now he expands his scope to examine a series of El Niño famines in the late 19th century. He shows that the human devastation across the globe was both a product of and a contributor to the expansion of European imperialism and the modernization of capitalism. No one writes about either natural history or capitalism with such gripping style. Now in paperback.