Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil

This book’s full title is Energy and Civilization, A History. I note that Bill Gates talks about this author, Vaclav Smil, he loves his loves his books and Vaclav Smil as an author. Leanna Garfield on Business Insider talks about Bill Gates love of books by Vaclav Smil saying that he has read nearly all 37 of his books. In this article, Bill Gates talks about 7 books of Vaclav Smil he read and loved.

I found this book fascinating. It was interesting to me that city sizes were limited by what they needed in fuel. Apparently, cities needed a land area 30 times the size of a city of trees for fuel. He also goes into the date and order we humans started growing crops and then domesticating animals. Vaclav Smil goes into detail of where and how and how much energy we got from different sources in our history.

As usual, there are lots of great reviews of this book on Good Reads. There is a great and detailed review of this book by Jeff Rutherford on the Stanford Energy Journal. There is another interesting review by Bart Hawkins Kreps on BioPhyseco.

There seems to be no video by Vaclav Smil on this book of Energy and Civilization. However, there are talks by Vaclav Smil Vaclav Smil talks at Equinoxabout Energy Transitions. Vaclav Smil talks about drivers of environmental change and focus on energy transitions at The University of British Columbia. In this video, Vaclav Smil is interviewed by Bill Gates.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.