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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

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This is an important book that debunks many of the myths and misinformation about the so called New World and the people who inhabited it prior to Columbus' arrival. It should be required reading for every high school student.
  ritaj65 | Nov 27, 2009 |
"History" of America pre Columbus. It may be that the population
was comparable with that of Europe, but the bulk of it was wiped
out by disease before the Europeans arrived in significant numbers. (Whether this si true
is certainly an important question.) ( )
  cgodsil | Oct 17, 2009 |
Highly recommended, at times romanticized, but always informative popular history that tells the story of pre-columbian America. ( )
  paulpekin | Sep 25, 2009 |
For me this was a mind-opening account of the cultures of America before Columbus. ( )
  Jaylia3 | Aug 19, 2009 |
1491 is a very enjoyable non-fiction book. Charles Mann tackles a subject that’s both big enough, and fresh enough, to immerse the interested reader from start to finish: what was the ‘new world’ of the western hemisphere really like in pre-Columbian days? Was it a sparsely-populated wilderness, dominated by ‘nature’ and traveled lightly by bands of low-impact nomads? Or were the complex urban societies such as the Maya and the Inca more typical?

Mann moves back and forth between broad historical narration and on-the-spot reportage of recent archaeological and anthropological research projects. His style for both is engaging, informative without being dull, and generally judicious.

Mann’s only flaw is his weakness for politically-correct digs at European civilization. This isn’t a big problem – he’s not a complete breast-beating apologizer – but he occasionally throws in remarks that really sound stupid if you stop to think about them, e.g. that the civilizations of the Americas were disadvantaged in comparison to Europeans because the latter had other advanced cultures such as China and the Islamic world from whom they could ‘steal’ all of their ideas.

Still, I’d highly recommend this one. It’s a fun and genuinely eye-opening read. ( )
  mrtall | Aug 17, 2009 |
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For the woman in the next-door office--

Cloudlessly, like everything

--CCM
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0739464418, Paperback)

Amazon.com 1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:23 -0400)

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