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

A charming yarn woven around a questionable idea that the "Little Ice Age" ushered in the European Enlightenment.  Indeed, during the XVI-XVII century the center of European science and engineering moved from Southern to Northern Europe but why worse harvests and failing crops accelerated economic development misses me entirely. Blom's unflinching clarity frequently prevents him to distinguish half-tones and he considers atheism as signifying progress.