wonderful, informative, great illustrations. The organization was terrific which made the contents easier to learn. ( )

This incredible book is an excellent resource for classroom teachers covering the Americas prior to Columbus. Photo images of Pre-Columbian artifacts, maps, drawings, and text boxes are interspersed with full-page color illustrations. Information is provided about the geographical, social, historical, and cultural lives of early inhabitants of the Americas.

I didn't think this book had a particularly engaging angle or voice and mostly read like a text book. ( )

I didn't think this book had a particularly engaging angle or voice and mostly read like a text book. ( )

Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491 is a book that reveals the complexities of life and cultures in the Americas before the arrival of the infamous Spaniard, but also highlights the complexities of ever-evolving historical perspective. Charles C. Mann avoids the traps of diluting history in order to make it more digestible for young readers. He explicitly paves the path that reveals how he came to ask the questions, genuine, complicated, involved questions, that eventually led to reasearching and writing the book. Mann direcly relates how these questions comprise the foundation for the organization of his book, which is segmented into three parts, each of which is titled with a question.
Mann sets the tone early on by challenging what he learned in school with what researchers have now discovered. Throughout the book, he expounds on the various methods, tools, techniques and theories that govern modern day research. The first page of the first chapter starts "Historian thought they knew how civilization began...however since the 1990s, a series of astonishing discoveries ...has given us a new view." He makes reference to and explains how radiocarbon dating, archeology, DNA, linguistics, and geology (stratigraphy) force historians to rewrite the written. Furthermore, because Mann presents competing theories, for example regarding the origins of maize, the reader begins to question the idea of a single, knowable reality. He also makes a point of illumintaing ethnocentricity and bias that occurs when comparing cultures.
The book makes points similar to that of the Pultizer Prize winning non-fiction novel, Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Mann's book explains how South America's lack of fauna led to limited domestication. While this inhibited trasportation of the Americans,it also kept Americans safe from zoonotic illnesses. Unfortunatly, smallpox and other diseases brought by Europeans devistate populations in the Americas. In an example involving the Incas and Pizarro, Mann goes on to dismiss the idea that guns and steel were the sole reason for Spanish victory, citing "recent studies of Incan culture, however, have made some historians think that the Inca were not fated to be defeated in battle...[they] had extremely efficient and powerful weapons" (40). There are a plethora of maps and every other four or fives pages displays a self-contained box of specific information regarding a very narrow topic. While the book is sprawling and contains volumuous amounts of information, tackling the whole of the Americas, its value for promoting science-based inquiry and research is immeasurable. ( )