- 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Author: Charles C. Mann
- Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America - Author: Steve Inskeep
- Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World - Author: Michael Pollan
- Better Living Through Birding - Author: Christian Cooper
- Wild New World: The Epic Story of People and Animals In America - Author: Dan Flores
- Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think - Author: Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Ronnlund, Ola Rosling
- The Common Good - Author: Robert Reich
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Author: L. Frank Baum
- Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies - Author: Jared Diamond
- Conspiracies & Conspiracy Theories: What We Should and Shouldn’t Believe – and Why - Author: Michael Shermer
- Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History - Author: Dan Flores
- What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures - Author: Malcolm Gladwell
- Killers of the Flower Moon - Author: David Grann
- Chip War - Author: Chris Miller
- Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ - Author: Giulia Enders
- A Little History of Science - Author: William F. Bynum
- The Home Place - Author: J. Drew Lanham
- The Pioneers - Author: David McCullough
- The Unsettling of America - Author: Wendell Berry
- Origin Story: A Big History of Everything - Author: David Christian
- H Is For Hawk - Author: Helen Macdonald
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Book Reading List - 2023
Friday, December 15, 2023
Book Review - 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Title - 1493: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Author: Charles C. Mann
Date Read: December 2023
Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
Date Read: December 2023
Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
Review: Fantastic book. This book as well as its prequel, 1491, should be required reading for anyone who wants to truly understand America (Northern, Central and Southern). I highly recommend his book.
The Columbian Exchange, as researchers call it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. More important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitched along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; rats of every description—all of them rushed like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before, changing lives and landscapes across the planet.
Eight decades after Columbus, a Spaniard named Legazpi succeeded where Columbus had failed. He sailed west to establish continual trade with China, then the richest, most powerful country in the world. In Manila, a city Legazpi founded, silver from the Americas, mined by African and Indian slaves, was sold to Asians in return for silk for Europeans. It was the first time that goods and people from every corner of the globe were connected in a single worldwide exchange. Much as Columbus created a new world biologically, Legazpi and the Spanish empire he served created a new world economically.
As Charles C. Mann shows, the Columbian Exchange underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest research by ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In such encounters, he uncovers the germ of today’s fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars.
In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.
Labels:
Book Lists,
Book Review,
Book Review 2023
Location:
Vancouver, WA, USA
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)