Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

by Philipp Blom

Fifth is the race that I call my own and abhor. O to die, or be later born, or born before! This is the Race of Iron. Dark is their plight. Toil and sorrow by day are theirs, and by night the anguish of death; and the gods afflict them and kill, though there’s yet a trifle of good amid manifold ill. —HESIOD, Works and Days1