Hurling Through History.

Humble homo sapiens has long been in thrall to outsize creatures, first out of fear and later for fun. From "King Kong" to "Jurassic Park," we never seem to tire of tales of charismatic megafauna and the mayhem they cause. Alfred W. Crosby's new book, "Throwing Fire," gives the tale a nice twist. Crosby, an environmental historian who has written eloquently about everything from bacteria to winds, has a simple but compelling point: for all their awesome might, yesterday's monsters turned into today's entertainment, and we humans got the last laugh. Obvious? Perhaps. But how we thin-skinned bipeds came out winners against such snarling odds--and what that has meant for the planet ever since--makes for a fine yarn, and Crosby tells it with style.

"Throwing Fire" turns on the deceptively simple observation that humans do a few things no other species does: stand upright, throw things and make fire. By standing up, we forfeited speed but freed two limbs for fashion-ing weapons and hurling things. Upright and aiming (rocks, spears, flaming arrows), our ancestors made short work of mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and lots more "Paleolithic Gotterdmmerung," Crosby writes. In no time, early man went from lunch to lord, chucking his way to the top of his phylum. But that was only the beginning. Our penchant for throwing things took us all the way to the moon and beyond, aboard fireborne rockets. Sadly, it also sponsored mass extinction and battles when we turned our lethal talent on one another.

"Throwing Fire" is a slight book, running just 199 pages, but Crosby whisks us breathlessly (too quickly?) through our entire bellicose history, reviewing projectile technology from the atlatl, a notched stick for throwing spears which added deadly thrust to the toss ("the Stone Age AK-47")--to laser-guided missiles and Osama bin Laden's Boeing bombs. In 1347 the Mongols catapulted Black Plague victims over enemy ramparts--the medieval version of anthrax in an envelope. At first read, Crosby's approach seems preposterously simplistic, to reduce the whole of history to an arms race. But Crosby's throw is much greater. What the first hominids and, later, full-dress humans were on to was not just a way ...