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wjmcomposer

wjmcomposer

Currently reading

Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
China Miéville
Operation Greylord: The True Story of an Untrained Undercover Agent and America's Biggest Corruption Bust
Terrence Hake, Wayne Klatt
Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto
Aaron Franklin, Jordan Mackay
My System: 21st Century Edition
Aron Nimzowitsch
The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book
Ted Kooser
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Francis Fukuyama
My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love
Karl Ove Knausgård, Don Bartlett
James Madison: A Biography
Ralph Louis Ketcham
The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805
Richard Zacks

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann Quite frankly an amazing book, and one of the very few I'd suggest is a MUST read. If you're ready to let go the myth of the hapless 'noble savage' and to release your mental image of a loin-clothed squaw with a single rear rolling down her cheek, and are ready to consider the possibility of fairly advanced cultures, of (as what is known as 'disturbance theory') the idea that the native cultures of the Americas had a massive and active, deliberate impact on the physical world around them, perhaps in some ways as much or more than we, then perhaps you should read this book and discover why the Amazon isn't quite how you think of it, how the terrain the first European settlers encountered was in many places a terraformed landscape, and generally challenge all your preconceived notions about pre-columbian America.