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How to combine human history with natural history and environmental studies shapes much of MIT history professor Harriet Ritvo’s reading. She reads books “that attempt to transcend conventional political and geographical limits”. After the Ice by Steven Mithen (Harvard, 2004) “uses an imaginative literary technique to evoke scenes from prehistory while also explaining how scientists have arrived at current consensus or disagreement about them”. In John F. Richards’s The Unending Frontier (California, 2003) and John McNeill and William McNeill’s The Human Web (W. W. Norton, 2003), she says the authors use their title metaphors to connect apparently unrelated developments…