A s much as we lament overloaded electrical grids, rising gasoline prices or the atmospheric effects of carbon emissions, we take for granted the abundance of energy all around us, and the abundance of its forms. One purpose of Richard Rhodes’s splendid “Energy: A Human History” is to remind us of the ingenuity that got us to this high-energy point. He offers a riveting account of humanity’s 400-year quest to bend the natural world to its own purposes, for good or ill. The story opens in Elizabethan England, in 1598, with the forcible removal of a theater belonging, putatively, to Shakespeare’s company of players, who needed it for a performance before the queen. The strong-arming was necessitated by the land owner’s announced intention of converting the theater to tenements. Once the theater was in the company’s hands, renamed the Globe, and relocated across the Thames, the snail-like processes of […]