Review by Choice Review
Although no relation to this reviewer, science, technology, and commerce journalist Mann is a myth-buster after her own heart. Disgusted with the mythologies still purveyed by textbooks on Native America--of pristine wildernesses thinly populated by unhistoried savages--Mann sets about tracing the footprints of Americas' First Nations, all over the hemisphere. In a tour de force, he brings previously inaccessible scholarship to general readers: mound cultures and constitutional democracies in North America; swamps made productive in Central America; terraced fields in the South American Andes; and the created forests and, more importantly, engineered soils of the Amazon. In between, the author notes Natives' unique, ancient writing systems, textile-and-tension technology, and advanced mathematics. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Especially for general readers and lower-division undergraduates. B. A. Mann University of Toledo
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Science journalist Mann proves audacious as a surveyor of pre-Columbian history, for few topics are so fraught with controversy. Emanating from the academic, activist, and environmental arenas, the disputes share a revisionist drive to dismantle the popular perception that the New World was a pristine wilderness in balance with its inhabitants. Accordingly, Mann opens with an episode familiar to most Americans, the Plymouth colony of the Pilgrims and its salvation by the friendly Squanto, or Tisquantum, his proper name, according to Mann. Indian altruism toward encroaching Europeans was never quite convincing, so following a discerning inquiry into Tisquantum's more likely motivations, with his Wampanoag people devastated by disease, Mann discusses examples of when warfare abruptly terminated Indian history, as with Pizarro and the Inka (formerly the Inca0 ). Drawing upon the research of recent decades, Mann constructs fascinating narratives of Indian empires, interweaving theories about their rise and fall that are debated by specialists in archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and ecology. Mann had to master an impressive breadth of material but better yet is his clarity and judgment, which meld into a compelling and balanced introduction for general readers. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This production is-as most nonfiction audios ought to be-a "reading" as distinct from a "performance." Johnson renders this thoroughly researched, well-written history of early North and South American Indian populations in a strong, clear voice, with excellent intonation. His diction is almost too perfect-one occasionally focuses on pronunciation rather than content. Most of the book is written in narrative form that sweeps listeners through an exciting rethinking of all we ever learned about when so-called Indians first inhabited the American continents and how they may have come here, about their numbers, religions, cultures, inventions, social structures and their relations to European invaders and settlers. When Mann relates the internecine battles among schools of anthropologists and archeologists, however, the listener might wish he had the book in hand for clarity. It might be wise from the start to make a list of the numerous Indian and European individuals and groupings. This audiobook is well worth the trouble. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, June 20). (August) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
What were the Americas like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus changed the native cultures of the Western Hemisphere forever? Mann, a correspondent for Science and the Atlantic Monthly, provides a fascinating, in-depth examination of this question, identifying tantalizing clues and offering new conclusions from recently discovered archaeological evidence. He explores three different but ultimately related themes. First, the demographics of pre-contact Native American societies are examined to demonstrate that populations in many parts of the Americas were actually much larger than previously believed. (In fact, in all likelihood, more people were living in the Americas, pre-1492, than in Europe.) Next, Mann probes the probability that native peoples inhabited the Americas much earlier than previously thought. Finally, he examines the ecological impact that indigenous groups had on their environments. 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. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/05.]-Elizabeth Salt, Otterbein Coll. Lib., Westerville, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Unless you're an anthropologist, it's likely that everything you know about American prehistory is wrong. Science journalist Mann's survey of the current knowledge is a bracing corrective. Historians once thought that prehistoric Indian peoples somehow lived outside of history, adrift and directionless, "passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way"; that view was central to the myth of the noble savage. In fact, writes Mann (Noah's Choice, with Mark L. Plummer, 1995), Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms; and their home continents "were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined." In defending this view, Mann visits several thriving controversies in the historic/prehistoric record. One is the question of pre-contact demographics: old-school scholars had long advanced the idea that there were only a few million Native Americans at the time of the Columbian arrival, whereas revisionists in the 1960s posited that there were eight million on the island of Hispaniola alone, a figure punctured by revisionists of revisionism, now beset by Native American activists for the political incorrectness of adjusting the census. Another controversy is the chronology of human presence in the Americas: the old date of 12,000 b.c., courtesy of the Bering Land Bridge in Alaska, no longer cuts it. Other arguments center on the nature of Native American societies such as the Aztec and Inca, the latter of whom built a great empire that, defying Western notions of logic, had no market component. Mann addresses each controversy with care, according the old-timers their due while making it clear that his sympathies lie, in the main, with the rising generation. He closes with a provocative thesis: namely, that the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, "living, breathing role models of human liberty." 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). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
