The abridged audio of this (11 1/4 hours on 9 CD's) is read by Peter Johnson.

You thought everyone that was in America before Columbus came from Asia, arriving via a trek across the Bering Straight, that American Indians learned about land development from Europeans, and that relatively few American Indians ever lived on this continent prior to the arrival of Columbus? Charles C. Mann tells us about the new generation of researchers who assert that these teachings and others are Myths—that the American Indians arrived long before glaciers melted to reveal a land bridge, that untold numbers of Indians probably died from diseases brought over by the Europeans and their livestock, and that the “wild” landscape Thoreau lamented man’s invasion of, was itself engineered by man.
At any rate, this is an interesting description of the ways that America’s past has become a controversial issue.
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When Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere, it was a nearly empty land with only a handful of people who hadn’t been there that long and had not done much in that time, right? 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann shatters narrative we learned in high school textbooks.

Throughout the book Mann tackled the familiar talking points, if not myths, of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and continual European contact. Over the course of 414 pages of text, Mann goes over the findings of scientists from multiple disciplines that reveal that at the time of contact the Americas were a highly populated area with numerous complex societies that had developed longer than previously thought and in a different way than those in the Old World. Yet it was how Native Americans shaped the land of both continents and all environments—especially the Amazon basin—that really made this a must read as Mann went into detail about the finds scientists had found. While Mann explored all these new finds, he does present the minority opinions among scientists who have issues with them yet the amount of evidence supporting this new conscious is very convincing. There might be comparisons with Jared Diamond and while Mann does mention some of Diamond points that he agrees with, but some of the evidence he presented refutes other of Diamond’s points though Mann never actually says anything to that affect. The one issue I had with the book was all the mistakes that a proofreader should have taken care of, especially since I was reading a second edition that Mann had added more content to.

1491 is a fascinating look into the Americas before continual European contact and the picture Charles C. Mann reveal through new scientific findings—at the time of publication—that do not look like what high school textbooks said they did. ( )

There are enough engrossing passages in this to keep you going but it frequently bogs down in nitty arguments between archaeologists that no one but themselves could possibly care about. I learned a hell of a lot though, so it was worth it. ( )

A must for anyone interested in American anthropology. It emphasizes the control exerted over the environment by early Americans. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the changes in fauna, though it was too short. The appendices were all very interesting as well ( )

(2005) Fair discourse on what the Americas were like before Columbus ?discovered? it. Kirkus: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).Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2005ISBN: 1-4000-4006-XPage Count: 480Publisher: KnopfReview Posted Online: May 20, 2010Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005