Book Review: 1491
Posted by
Kevin
1491 is a re-examination of what life was like in the Americas before the permanent arrival of Europeans. It is based on the most recent scientific work and is written by someone who knows how to explain even the most complicated scientific process in a clear and enlightening fashion. And I didn’t enjoy it anywhere as much as I think I should have.
The story itself is fascinating. The Americas before the arrival of Europeans turn out to have been much more populated than is generally understood. Places that we traditionally think of as largely empty — the Amazon and the interior of North America, for example — where actually the home of large, complex, city-building cultures. Those cultures were destroyed ahead of European history by the diseases that the first European explorers and their animals brought with them. The final numbers are in dispute, (a dispute covered very fairly by the author) but up to 95% of the original population of the Americas could have been killed by diseases and the resultant societal collapse. What is not in doubt that is that entire cultures disappeared after their first contact with European explorers. Further, the coastal Native Americans in North America more than held their own against European incursions for the first few decades of contact. It was only after diseases had shattered those nations that the conquest of North America could begin in earnest.
The portions of the book that focus on the lost cultures and the history of interaction between European invaders and Native Americans are the best portions of the book. The discussions of the science, as I mentioned, are nearly as interesting. Unfortunately, the book spends too much time dealing with the personalities behind the science. I am sure that most of the people profiled are nice, smart, and love kittens. But they are not one tenth as fascinating as the cultures they re-discovered, and time spent on them is time that could have been spent giving more detail about the fascinating and doomed cultures of the Americas.
It is th examination of those cultures — in many case, cultures that no school textbook has ever introduced you too — that make this book worth buying. For all its fault’s, 1491 does a marvelous job of conveying a sense of the lost cultures and a sense of the magnitude of that loss. And entire world, with cultures that were sometime much more enlightened (and some times not; 1491 is no hagiography of Native Americans), was destroyed in a handful of decades by greed, religious bigotry, and a terrible quirk of biology. 1491 is a good first attempt to explain what was lost and how it was destroyed.
