The Blue Hill Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an event with Castine author and Professor of History Clifton Crais on Thursday, July 9 at 7 PM in the library's Howard Room. Clifton will discuss his new book, The Killing Age, a sharp account of how our current planetary crisis emerged from the worst cataclysmic destruction in human history, which he terms the Mortecene—the killing age. 

From the publisher: "In this landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.

Drawing on years of scholarship and marshaling myriad sources across world history, The Killing Age turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror—how it shaped who we are, what we value and fear, and the precarious present we inhabit today.' 

Clifton Crais is Professor of History at Emory University specializing in African and comparative history. He has previously held teaching positions at Johns Hopkins, Stanford University, and Kenyon College. He has published numerous books on slavery, empire, colonialism, inequality, violence, climate change and the environment, including The Politics of Evil (which won the 2004 Ohio Academy of History Prize), Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa and Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus. He is also the author of the memoir History Lessons, which was a Kirkus Best Memoir of 2014. Crais lives in Castine, Maine.

This program is free and open to the public. Blue Hill Books will be on site with copies of the book available for purchase. For more information, please call the library at 374-5515 or email Assistant Director Kayleigh Thomas at kayleigh.thomas[at]bhpl.net.