CIVILIZATIONS: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature.

IN HIS INTRODUCTION, FELIPE Fernandez-Armesto does his best to deter you from reading his new book, Civilizations. He warns that he has written it "in something like a frenzy, anxious to get down what I wanted to say before I forgot it," and, additionally, "few specialist readers have restrained or righted the judgments." If madcap, inaccurate writing isn't enough to discourage you, the Oxford professor warns of coming inscrutable allusions: "I think literature in which everything is explicit is no fun to read."

Still, the subject of the book is irresistible. As science decodes the human genome, we've been learning the amazing extent to which everyone is made up of the same stuff, from Abyssinians to Ziqualis. So why are the societies we've built so very different? What can an American civilization of Wal-Marts and Hollywood learn from the Kalahari Bushmen? How did a species so genetically connected reach a point where it seems half the world is dieting and the other half is foraging for food?

Trying to discern how civilizations developed was one of the great tasks of historians, from Oswald Spengler to Arnold Toynbee, in the years running up to World War II. But with the Cold War, curiosity about the roots of civilization was substantially edged out by the more immediate struggle between democratic capitalism and communism, both of which claimed to have the formula for how the rest of the world could, and should, develop.

Now, of course, it's clear that the Communists struck out everywhere and, although increasingly dominant, the democratic capitalists have failed to bring benefit to a great deal of the world. Much of sub-Saharan Africa has actually gotten poorer since 1990 and Russians have been longing for Brehznev since not long after they began their capitalist experiment. Unsurprisingly, scholars and readers are now reaching beyond political and economic models for a deeper understanding of how civilizations evolve and why some prosper. David Landes recently published a magnum opus, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, to much acclaim. Jared Diamond's Pulitzer-prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, about the mostly environmental reasons the West came to dominate industrial development, has now been on The New York Times' paperback best-seller list for more than 100 weeks. Civilizations is the next major crack at the topic.

After the discouraging introduction, Civilizations gets off to a strong start. Fernandez-Armesto vividly describes the struggle to carve societies out of arctic climates and desert wastes, offering interesting detail on nearly every page, even if, true to his word, the writing can be a little cryptic. He introduces us, for example, to the men and women of Skateholm, in Southern Sweden, who depended on dogs so much for their survival that they were often buried next to their canine companions, often in less dignified graves. They also believed they were descended from a Swedish princess driven into exile "with only her dog for company." Fernandez-Armesto then takes us into the Sahara where blind guides were considered the most effective in the 14th century since "eyesight was delusive in the desert." Next, it's on to the Eurasian steppe where Mongols reportedly "barked like dogs, ate raw flesh, drank their horse's urine, knew no laws, and showed no mercy." Then we're off to the grasslands, the tropics, the mountains, and so on.

In every region, the pattern proves the same: Humans managed to form civilizations no matter the environmental obstacles, always shaping their civilization with the environment. Even the bogs of Frederik Hendrik Island off New Guinea proved hospitable, despite Fernandez-Armesto nominating them as the worst place on earth. The island is a place "of fetid swamp, unhealthy miasmas, shadeless bush, and painful extremes of heat and cold." But people have persevered, building a civilization by dredging parts of the swamp to create mounds on which to build huts and plant their yams. "The men," the author helpfully adds, "delouse their hair by caking it with mud which they remove, when dry, with an inner crust of lice"

Throughout, Fernandez-Armesto tries to stay away from making value judgments over whether one civilization is better than another. But there's an undertone of contempt for modernity. The Bushman, for example, "blends into the bush, hiding from the creatures on whom he preys, and who might prey on him.... This is as near as you can get to life without civilization." But the Bushmen still prowl through the Kalahari and their society continues today. Thus, "by the most critical measure of success, it is better than civilization." Toward the end of the book, Fernandez-Armesto even harkens back to Gandhi's famous quip when asked what he thought about European civilization, "I would be in favor of it."

In a way, Fernandez-Armesto's distaste for Atlantic civilization is the most interesting idea of the book. But unfortunately, he doesn't follow through, perhaps because it's an awfully tough case to make. If a civilization's highest aspiration should be to modify its environment and survive, are ants more civilized than Romans? Is living in harmony with nature on a dollar a day in the Sahel truly no worse than living in Des Moines? Fernandez-Armesto never gets around to answering these questions, or even really posing them, because he is too busy bouncing from one century and environment to the next. Ultimately, to the extent that Fernandez-Armesto has a thesis, it's that the environment is important and that the way civilizations manage it is important too. Fair enough. But a reader could learn pretty much the same thing by watching the Discovery Channel.

A few years ago, I visited a tiny isolated village in the Dogon country of Mali. It was the kind of place Fernandez-Armesto would love. The whole village appeared to simply rise out of the desert, with huts and a mosque built out of sand. In a custom apparently dating back as far as anyone knew, the village's spiritual father lived in a crevice on the rock face nearby and was only allowed down once a year. It was a beautiful, environmentally sound, fascinating place. And half the children died before they reached adulthood. Many of the rest lived in constant hunger.

There are no easy answers to the question of how the developed world can best share its medicine, technology, and wealth with villages in the Dogon. But that's surely something Fernandez-Armesto should have grappled with. Instead, he trundles along with a breezy cultural relativism and an undertone that humanity should actually aspire to something like desert life in the Dogon. Civilizations is a fascinating compendium of world history, but it will take another book to synthesize what Fernandez-Armesto has tracked down.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON is an editor of The Washington Monthly.