1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [285]
ALSO BY CHARLES C. MANN
@ Large: The Strange Case of the World’s Biggest Internet Invasion (1997)
(with David H. Freedman)
Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (1995)
(with Mark L. Plummer)
The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine and 100 Years of Rampant Competition (1993)
(with Mark L. Plummer)
The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (1987)
(with Robert P. Crease)
ACCLAIM FOR CHARLES C. MANN’S
1491
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A Time Magazine • Boston Globe • Salon • San Jose Mercury News
Discover Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • USA Today
New York Sun • Times Literary Supplement • New York Times
Best Book of the Year
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“A journalistic masterpiece: lively, engaging…. A wonderfully provocative and informative book.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Provocative…. A Jared Diamond–like volley that challenges prevailing thinking about global development. 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.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Engagingly written and utterly absorbing…. Exciting and entertaining…. Mann has produced a book that’s part detective story, part epic and part tragedy. He has taken on a vast topic: thousands of years, two huge continents and cultures that range from great urban complexes to small clusters of villages, a diversity so rich that our shorthand word for the people who inhabited the Americas—Indians—has never seemed more inadequate or inaccurate.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Marvelous…. A revelation…. Our concept of pure wilderness untouched by grubby human hands must now be jettisoned.”
—The New York Sun
“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.”
—The Seattle Times
“A must-read survey course of pre-Columbian history—current, meticulously researched, distilling volumes into single chapters to give general readers a broad view of the subject.”
—The Providence Journal
“Eminently evenhanded and engaging…. Mann’s colorful commentary sets the right tone: scholarly but hip.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Concise and brilliantly entertaining…. Reminiscent of John McPhee’s eloquence with scientific detail and Jared Diamond’s paradigm-shifting ambition…. Makes me think of history in a new way.”
—Jim Rossi, Los Angeles Times
“Engrossing…. Sift[s] adroitly through the accumulating evidence and the academic disputes. 1491 should be required reading in all high school and university world history courses.”
—Foreign Affairs
“An excellent bit of missionary work in relieving the general ignorance in the West about these once-great American cultures…. Mann has a facility for translating academese into laymen’s language and for writing about scientific complexities with a light hand…. There is, incidentally, nothing of political correctness in this book other than a recognition of the sensitivity of the issues.”
—Literary Review
“Monumental…. 1491 is less a self-contained work per se and more an induction ceremony into what, for many readers, promises to be a lifelong obsession with the startling new perspective slowly opening up on this prehistory. What’s most shocking about 1491 is the feeling it induces of waking up from a long dream and slowly realizing just how thoroughly one has been duped…. Mann slips in so many fresh, new interpretations of American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work.”
—Salon
“Well-researched and racily written…. Entertainingly readable, universally accessible…. There are few better introductory books on the civilizations of pre-Columbian America, and none so up-to-date”
—The Spectator
“[A] triumph…. A fascinating, unconventional account of Indian life in the Americas prior to 1492.