Summary and Reviews of 1491 by Charles Mann

Media Reviews

Kirkus Reviews An excellent, and highly accessible, survey of America's past: a worthy companion to Jake Page's In the Hands of the Great Spirit (2003).

Library Journal - Elizabeth Salt Mann has done a superb job of analyzing and distilling information, offering a balanced and thoughtful perspective on each of his themes in engaging prose. Including an extensive bibliography, this excellent archaeological synthesis is highly recommended for anthropology and archaeology collections in academic and large public libraries.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In a riveting and fast-paced history, massing archeological, anthropological, scientific and literary evidence, Mann debunks much of what we thought we knew about pre-Columbian America.

Joseph J. Ellis, author of His Excellency: George Washington When does American history begin? The old answer used to be 1492, with the European arrival in the Americas. That answer is no longer politically or historically correct. For the last thirty years or so historians, geographers and archaeologists have built up an arsenal of evidence about the residents of North America after the ice receded and before the Europeans arrived. Mann has mastered that scholarship and written the most elegant synthesis of the way we were before the European invasion.

Alfred W. Crosby, author of Ecological Imperialism and The Columbian Exchange, Professor Emeritus of Geography, American Studies and History, University of Texas If you accept that there were tens of millions of people in the Americas in 1492, the common belief among the experts today, then you cannot reject what Charles Mann has to say. We all have been taught what the human species gained by the European invasion of the Americas. Now we have to consider what we, all of us, lost.

The Washington Post - Alan Taylor ....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.....he is also less than discriminating in evaluating the array of new theories, some far weaker than others....despite these missteps, Mann's 1491 vividly compels us to re-examine how we teach the ancient history of the Americas and how we live with the environmental consequences of colonization.

 James Wilson, author of The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America A superbly written and very important book: by far the most comprehensive synthesis I've ever seen of the growing body of evidence that our most deep-rooted ideas about the peopling of the Western hemisphere and the kinds of societies that had developed there by the time of European contact are fundamentally wrong. Charles C. Mann is one of those rare writers who can make scholarly concepts exciting and accessible without trivializing them. In 1491 he has integrated the latest research in many different areas with his own insights and experiences to produce a fascinating and addictively readable tour through the 'New World' before its 'discovery.' His book is, above all, a wonderful, unsentimental act of restitution--challenging centuries of cultural contempt and willful blindness to show just how vigorous, various, densely populated and profoundly human the pre-Columbian Americas really were.

Reader Reviews

Sharon Damiata
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Fantastic book! For anyone with any curiosity about Native Americans and their ways of life in the Western Hemisphere! Educational and a joy to read! Jacob Litoff
Excellent Book
I greatly enjoyed reading this book and discovering the history of the Native American Indians. Peter Boyle
What Archaeology Tells Us
As a retired Archaeologist I found 1491 to be a readable synthesis of what Archaeologists and Geographers have talked about for a long time. Humans have been in the Americas for over 20,000 years (as recent, long suppressed, publications by Tom ...   Read More Mary Lee Parrington
A Fresh Look at the
It turns out "The New World" wasn't so new after all. The idea that North and South America, before Columbus, was home to more inhabitants than Europe at that time is completely at odds with what we learned in school. But in a work that synthesizes...   Read More

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