Customer Reviews:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
It makes no difference which chapter you ask yourself more questions about, this book challenges your mind to "want to know more". I hope educational systems adopt the position that this book becomes mandatory reading.
Very rarely does one find a book that challenges your belief system so completely. The Why's are floating around in my mind prompting me to dig into them and find answers; which will generate more why's, which is good. Knowledge is good. This is Life, I along with Inca's, Mayan's, and countless others, have a right and obligation to get better at living it.

A change in perspective
It's really hard to under estimate how different my perspective is on the Americas after reading "1491". Being an enthusiast of the Native American culture in the Desert Southwest, I was shocked to read the evidence for extensive advanced civilization throughout North and South America. Had I not read various articles in Scientific American and books such as "Guns, Germs, and Steel", I think I would have doubted most of what is in Mr. Mann's book.

The book flows fairly well and is not too technical. I would guess it appeals mostly to people who like details and stories that dive far below the surface. The author does this well and introduces us to people on the way. The second half of the book engaged me much more, with the stories of specific characters in the whole story. The book kept me engaged and it was hard to put down.

The year before...
It's a great title, and a great book. Though some reviewers have fussed at the sub-title, claiming that there weren't really new revelations in the book, should I be ashamed to admit that almost all the book was history of the best kind; the history I did not know?

Of course the book is not literally about that year; it covers the period from the very first arrival of humans in America, which Mann claims is substantially before the 12,000 BC Bering Straits land bridge arrival that I had been taught; and it extends to much beyond the initial arrival of the Europeans, to cover their interactions with the natives. The author devotes major sections to the civilizations in what is now Peru, and Mexico; the prehistoric finds in eastern New Mexico; the Cahokia "mound builders" around modern-day St. Louis; the arrival of the Pilgrims in New England; and life in "Amazonia."

Charles Mann is not a "scholar"; instead he has a journalist background writing for "Science" and the "Atlantic Monthly," and I think the reader is much better served as a result. He displays humbling erudition, managing to incorporate observations by Nabokov and Pascal, while also capable of giving a concise explanation of the Carbon-14 dating process in one paragraph. His central premise is to debunk the idea that not many people were in America, in 1491, and that they were "primitives," devoid of higher learning. His first chapter is entitled "Holmberg's Mistake," after the academic who promoted the concept, and Mann quotes from historians George Bancroft, Samuel Eliot Morison and Hugh Trevor-Roper who supported this view. Time and again throughout the book Mann has the gift for selecting an appropriate analogy to make his point, in this case: "It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving." Mann certainly does not paint a Rousseauian paradise prior to 1492, with observations like "Because human beings rarely volunteer to spend their days loading baskets with heavy rocks to build public monuments..." nonetheless, he stresses the all too human tendency to denigrate the living conditions and morality of those from whom you are taking their property and land.

My copy is thoroughly "marked up," with passages that I want to return to, and consider, and even quote in the future. For example: "trade in goods was important, but it was the trade in ideas that mattered." Mann was discussing the rise of the empires in central Mexico, but it is at least as important to contemplate today, when, nominally, we have such a flow of ideas, but in practice the barriers to the acceptance of new ideas is high. Or how about expressive formulations: "Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift." In terms of establishing the "glue," that "animating ideology" that holds a society together, and he cites "manifest destine and "Mission civilisatrice," as examples; for the Mexican leader, Tlacaelel, Mann says the following: "He came up with a corker: a theogony that transformed the Mexica into keepers of the cosmic order."

Mann writes well, he thinks well, and has presented an excellent synthesis of some of the current theories and research on pre-Columbian America, and what happened to the natives after the arrival of the Europeans. There are some interesting appendixes, particularly the one on calendar calculations. Humbling also is the bibliography, which underscores why there was so much history I did not know. Are there mistakes of fact, as some of the low star reviewers indicate? Probably, in a work so broad in scope, and I trust he would correct in a revision. Are there mistakes in emphasis? Is he too "political correct," in other words? Not for me; think the images of the "innocent white settlers" in those wagon trains being attacked by the "savages," for no reason at all, could still use some additional correction with a dose of reality. Very well done, a solid 5-star read.

Lots of things i did not know
I found this book absolutely facinating and urge you to read it. There are way, way too few records of early contact with Europeans, but C. C. Mann does an excelent job of linking them with archealogical information and other evidence of pre-contact N and S Americal.

Read it!!!!

"Revelation" is a relative concept...
This book has several serious flaws. First, the presentation is very disorganized; the author is a journalist and not a historian and it shows. Secondly, as a journalist, the author has no real expertise in any of the fields he writes about; it's all a synthesis of other people's work (which isn't necessarily bad but the reader should keep this in mind when the author offers his conclusions/opinions. Third, I'm not sure how "new" these "revelations" really are. I'm not an expert in field but I am a reasonably well-read lay-person; much of this information was familiar to me. A lot of this stunning new research has been around for decades.

The basis thesis of this book is: Native American societies were (1) older, (2) more populous, and (3) more sophisticated then we had been taught to believe. I was under the impression that, on the most general level, these were widely accepted facts by this point. I'm not sure if there are (serious) people who still argue to the contrary.

I suppose that if you are unfamiliar with this subject, then this book might be worth reading. I suspect, however, that one would not have to look very long to find a better-written work. If you are already familiar with the topic, then you will be disappointed by _1491_.

Not recommended.

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