First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: It’s the End of the World as We Know It

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Comes the end of the year, the last First Monday of the year. With the world ending on Dec. 21 and all, my selection for this month seems entirely appropriate: Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

This 2006 best-seller by the science writer and Atlantic Monthly contributor was a huge, popular revelation when it was released. It brought to a mass audience a major revision of our understanding of Native Americans' impact on the environment, the depth and richness of Native cultures, and the utter (and largely unintended) devastation wrought on Native populations by Western diseases.

Mann compellingly musters the academic evidence to argue that Native populations were huge prior to the arrival of Westerners, that those populations had highly sophisticated economies, polities and cultures in many cases, and that many Native cultures had dramatic impacts on the landscape, from sculpting and expanding the Great Plains, to building magnificent pyramids, to cultivating a complex ecosystem in the Amazon, to crafting a sophisticated trading culture in the Andes.

Perhaps most importantly, Mann offers us lay readers a new understanding of the relationship between the Indians and the early settlers in North America. As the New York Times review of the book put it,

According to some estimates, as much as 95 percent of the Indians may have died almost immediately on contact with various European diseases, particularly smallpox. That would have amounted to about one-fifth of the world's total population at the time, a level of destruction unequaled before or since. The exact numbers, like everything else, are in dispute, but it is clear that these plagues wreaked havoc on traditional Indian societies. European misreadings of America should not be attributed wholly to ethnic arrogance. The "savages" most of the colonists saw, without ever realizing it, were usually the traumatized, destitute survivors of ancient and intricate civilizations that had collapsed almost overnight. Even the superabundant "nature" the Europeans inherited had been largely put in place by these now absent gardeners, and had run wild only after they had ceased to cull and harvest it.

These are important cultural adjustments that will probably take another generation or more to fully be accepted by our national psyche. This is no guilt-ridden, lefty apologia, but rather an honest attempt to help us make better sense of our real past in this hemisphere. The book is fairly well-written, if non-linear in its presentation. It won't keep you up at night with riveting story-telling, but it has a lot to teach, and a lot to ponder. I would have appreciated Mann taking Jared Diamond's work more seriously (there are only two, brief mentions of Diamond's work in the book, even though much of the story he tells fits closely with Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel explanations for European conquest of the New World), and eminent historian Alan Taylor delivered some trenchant criticisms in his WaPo review, but I nonetheless found the book to be tremendously interesting.

Shifting gears, I return to the end-times theme. It's the end of the year, which is a time of lists. And since this a book post, my lists are about books. Duh.

Here are two biggies: Slate's best books of 2012 and the NY Times 100 Notable Books of 2012 list. Ho ho ho. I can honestly say that I have not read a single book on either of those lists (what, no A Dance With Dragons??? PrePOSterous!!!!). But I bet that in five years, I will have read a handful of them.

What are you reading, or at least buying for someone you love?

23 thoughts on “First Monday Book Day: It’s the End of the World as We Know It”

  1. I read 1491 earlier this year. Nice write-up. I also read his follow-up (1493, natch), which was also decent.

  2. I'm not too proud to admit I read The Hunger Games. One of my brothers, several of my sisters, and my mother have all been pushing it on me for a long time. I haven't read a book that quickly (or that easy) in a really really long time. I tend to be a bit of a book snob (ever since college, when I took a Great Books class). Ultimately, the action in the book was a lot of fun, but whenever the author was trying to do subtext or deeper meaning or really anything but action, the result was terribly painful. Suspending belief to assume that the world took on the dystopian form that's in place when the story begins was really really difficult for me to do. I wanted to spend the first 50 pages pointing out problems with the setting. The heavy-handedness and total lack of nuance was disturbing. Also, the protagonist is pretty much the most obtuse, unaware main character I've ever encountered. This isn't a case of the audience being able to figure out more than the character - it's a case where the author pretends like people haven't figured things out and so allows her character to wander around unaware until there's a "big reveal" (usually a loooong time later), that isn't really a reveal at all.

    All of that said... the action was top-notch, and once I was able to set aside those issues, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. I'm reading the 2nd one now. It has a lot of the same problems, but at least the author is trying to focus on the action. That's a definite strength.

    I'm also still working my way through Invisible Man. Strangely, it has one of the same problems as The Hunger Games: that the protagonist is only acted upon, not an actor. I'm about half way through. I sense that things might change for the better. It's an engaging read, and I see why it's a classic, but it's not my favorite of the Great Books, that's for sure.

    2. I read "Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet", too. I read quite a few stories like it growing up. I like science fiction from that era.

  4. I read 1491 a couple of years ago and enjoyed it (although not as much as Sheenie who really gets into scientific histories what with her enginerding background).

    This last month I finished up Anna Karenina and loved it. Tolstoy cast an incredible web of characters and intricately woven meloncholy.

    I also read A World Undone because I realized I had never really read an entire comprehensive account of WWI. Very, very intersting stuff. I just started Postwar by Tony Judt and I can already tell it is going to take me awhile.

    1. We read A Short History of WWI in college; what an incredibly depressing read. My favorite story though was a division of Welshmen who were to take a hill, and did so by using their mining expertise to dig into the hill and then blow it up, capturing the stunned Jerries stumbling around afterward.

      1. That story was included in the book. It occurred in 1917 somewhere near Ypres (of course, saying something in WWII occurred near Ypres doesn't really narrow it down much).

      1. we have the whole series. Some psychedelic sh!t there. Really makes one wonder how much of the original was really political allegory, and how much was him huffing whacky weed.

  7. Nice write-up bS...as soon as I finish Steel I'll pick this one up.

    I'm also mostly done with The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace. I really enjoyed his historical discussions about Jefferson in France & the attempts to develop viniculture in America, the Bordeaux region, the Classification, the various discoveries of old wine caches...etc. I have not enjoyed the discussion of well-off rich filthy-stinkin'rich wine connoisseurs snobs throwing "verticals" parties to outdo each other and driving up the cost of wine to where most people will never sample a Mouton or Lafitte, let alone buy a bottle.

      1. Interesting, I'll have to check that out. One of the stories from Vinegar involved the scientific analysis of a purported Jefferson bottle. One thing that they found was a hunk of lead buried in the sediment at the bottom. It didn't seem to raise any eyebrows (except mine when I read it) and Wallace didn't follow up with any explanation for it...flavoring huh?

  9. One of my facepeeps posted this link to a story about Madeleine L'Engle: a review of a book of interviews with her.

    As yet there is no full-length biography of L’Engle, who died in 2007 at age eighty-eight. Those of us who memorized her books as children might wonder who would want to read one. Isn’t Meg Murry, the gawky, headstrong protagonist of A Wrinkle in Time, a self-portrait of L’Engle as the bookish and brilliant adolescent she must have been? And wasn’t the Austin series a chronicle of her adult family life—the New England farmhouse bustling with children, pets, and glamorous friends always coming and going? But ,i>Listening for Madeleine, a lightly edited compilation of interviews conducted by Leonard S. Marcus with a variety of people who knew L’Engle, makes clear that the truth was more complicated. Just as reality plays an important role in even L’Engle’s most fantastic fiction, fantasy also tended to intrude on her representations of reality, so that what we imagine to be autobiography is in fact something far less stable.

    1. For Christmas circa 1992, my nearest older cousin (a girl of 14) gave me A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet for the annual cousin gift exchange.

      I almost cried when I opened the package.

      I had never heard of Madeleine L'Engle and though I was a voracious reader (which, in hindsight, makes the gift all the more insightful), a boy of 12 did not want books where the protagonist was a stubborn, glasses-wearing teenaged girl.

      After reading about 106 pages in one sitting (later that Christmas break when I'd run out of "boy" books), I was completely hooked. I thereafter read Madeleine's entire catalogue. It wasn't until probably 2008 that I finally remembered to thank my cousin for the gift, but I think I made up for it with my effusive and lavish praise.

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