Tangential: the cover of Allen's book uses the exact same painting as Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization?? I'm reading too much into this but that seems a bit suspect and lazy... And yes I judge books by their covers; it is actually a fairly reliable heuristic for me (edit: but in this case the heuristic would fail me because this book sounds excellent)
https://mit-press-us.imgix.net/covers/9780262536165.jpg?auto...
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gNLyXI-BL.jpg
Also check out MIT Press using imgix for their image server!)