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If you are interested in learning how the Little Ice Age impacted life in the Seventeenth Century (much less how it might be impacting life now), you will find little of that here. The author barely mentions the Ice Age. This book is mainly a somewhat disjointed series of vignettes for the most part covering the intellectual advances that took places during the time period in question. Well, of that there is little doubt. You don't have to be an advanced history major to be aware of that. But if that is your interest, there are much better books out there on the subject. But as to how this intellectual development was impacted by the Little Ice Age, about the only evidence the author seems to put forward is that they both happened at the same time. And as any beginning (first week, actually) student in statistics can tell you, correlation does not mean causation. The author seems to want you to take it purely on faith that the intellectual developments of the Seventeenth Century were impacted by the Ice Age, without presenting any other evidence than that the potato replaced grain crops in northern Europe. Curious. And quite frankly, I'm not even convinced that the Ice Age was the prime mover in that. Plainly put, there's not much here.