|
S'està carregant… 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbusde Charles C. Mann
  
Top Five Books of 2013 (332) » 10 més
True confession? I have a rather large obsession with pre-history land masses. "Pre-history" meaning: before being found by "civilized" white folks. My obession started in Washington State and checking out glacial mounds there, fasicnating. Living in Louisiana and checking out Poverty Point, not realizing from this book that there was an even larger one closer to me.... Living in Illinois and dragging my family to Cahokia Mound by the Mississippi River. Traveling to Ireland to check out Newgrange. I do have it rather bad. Then this book mentions SO. MANY. MORE! I must admit I skimmed the first parts as they were more in South and Central America, but boy do I want to go to Belize even more now! Then, the chapters about North America, and it was right where I have been before. So exciting! I just love this stuff and really try to hold in the urge to recreate these things in my backyard but it is getting harder to do that. Anyway....I won't recommend this book to any of my friends because they will think I am crazier than I am. But, if any friends read this review and have their interests piqued, please let me know. :) (  ) BarbF410 | May 22, 2022 |  A super interesting and in-depth look at the 2 American continents before they were colonized. The author brings a lot of new information suggesting the civilizations were much more abundant and advanced then thought. It is a very insight read and a new way to look at history at this part of the world. I highly recommend it. (  ) renbedell | Apr 17, 2022 | There was a lot of new information for me to chew. If Charles Mann had just stuck with what happen in the Americas before Columbus I would not have suffered any mental indigestion. But he inserts his own experiences, way to long descriptions of researchers and their quarrels, and references to Eurasian ancient history. I admire Mann's premise of setting the record straight about human presence in the Americas before Columbus. It is certainly necessary that the larger public gets educated on this subject. A less complex text would have helped a great deal. (  ) Marietje.Halbertsma | Jan 9, 2022 | fascinating book about the pre-columbus western hemisphere a much more populous and advanced set of societies than i learned about as a kid ( ) austinburns | Dec 16, 2021 | This book will probably change your perception of history. As it should. With a sweeping, overhead view of the cultures that lived in and shaped the lands prior to European intervention, it also gets beautifully specific. Also, reading this mid-COVID19, I found the discussion and research about disease fascinating. Why, after all, were the white settlers in the mid-1770s less likely to die from the reemerging Smallpox compared to the Native American counterparts? By all accounts, both should have been exposed by this point. And the answer has little to do with the crude vaccines that John Adams & Co. underwent. Just another book proving that it's hard to get the big, full picture when you're living in the middle of something. And possibly only a little less hard when you're removed from it by many generations. Let's not make another mistake in judgment, as we're being led through our present-day jungle. I also love the caution at the end: that "to judge the past by the standards of today [is] a fallacy disparaged as 'presentism' by social scientists."* *Pg 335 Note: His "lost tribes" chapter was fascinating, for a religious person such as myself. ( )1  OutOfTheBestBooks | Sep 24, 2021 |
 Mann has written an impressive and highly readable book. Even though one can disagree with some of his inferences from the data, he does give both sides of the most important arguments. 1491 is a fitting tribute to those Indians, present and past, whose cause he is championing. Mann has chronicled an important shift in our vision of world development, one our young children could end up studying in their textbooks when they reach junior high.  Mann does not present his thesis as an argument for unrestrained development. It is an argument, though, for human management of natural lands and against what he calls the "ecological nihilism" of insisting that forests be wholly untouched. Mann's style is journalistic, employing the vivid (and sometimes mixed) metaphors of popular science writing: "Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift. . . . its coastline hits the ocean floor and crumples up like a carpet shoved into a chairleg." Similarly, the book is not a comprehensive history, but a series of reporter's tales: He describes personal encounters with scientists in their labs, archaeologists at their digs, historians in their studies and Indian activists in their frustrations. Readers vicariously share Mann's exposure to fire ants and the tension as his guide's plane runs low on fuel over Mayan ruins. These episodes introduce readers to the debates between older and newer scholars. Initially fresh, the journalistic approach eventually falters as his disorganized narrative rambles forward and backward through the centuries and across vast continents and back again, producing repetition and contradiction. The resulting blur unwittingly conveys a new sort of the old timelessness that Mann so wisely wishes to defeat. Té l'adaptacióAbreujat a
Referències a aquesta obra en fonts externes.
|
Cobertes populars
 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)970.01 — History and Geography North America North America North America -1599LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (4.16)
Ets tu?Fes-te Autor del LibraryThing.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1491
1
