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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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