New Historical light on Americas before 1492
The TRUE historical Facts!
It is to me always THRILLING when NEW historic proof emerges on the scene to blast away old ideas, concepts, and centuries old false teachings. I was pleased to kinda stumble across this book as I was visiting one of our Canadian large book stores in Calgary. More and more "history" is being re-written and new books on various histories are coming out it seems each year. Those of you who love history, the new truths of history, will love this book - a superb research of what the Americas were like before Columbus ever set foot on this land. Get ready to turn up- side-down all you were ever taught about the Americas before Columbus .... yes this is 1491 and before, way before. Keith Hunt ACCLAIM FOR CHARLES C. MANN'S - 1491 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 "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 ProvidenceJournal "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. - Business Week "Fascinating.... A landmark of a book that drops ingrained images of colonial America into the dustbin, one after the other. - The Boston Globe Charles C. Mann's groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, now expanded and updated in this new edition, radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, Columbus did not land in a sparsely settled, near-pristine wilderness. Recent research has shown that Indians arrived millennia earlier than previously thought and shaped the lands around them in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Native cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that has been called man's first feat of genetic engineering. Perhaps most surprising, many researchers believe that past Indian cultures created much of today's Amazon forest. This is a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew. "A gripping. man-on-the-ground tour of a world most of us barely intuit.... An exhilarating shift in perspective.... 1491 erases our myth of a wilderness Eden. It replaces that fallacy with evidence of a different genesis, exciting and closer to true." - The Plain Dealer "Mann tells a powerful, provocative and important story. . . . 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." - The Washington Post Book Word CHARLES C. MANN - "1491" Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, and has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, and for HBO and Law & Order. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he is the recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His 1491 won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. www.charlesmann.org .......... |
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