» This week on Cool Tools, Kevin Kelly is reviewing
5 Good Books. Kelly has a gift for conveying his enthusiasm when making recommendations. Nearly every book and film he's ever recommended sound tremendously interesting to me, even when I'm not interested in the subject matter at all. But
the book he recommends today,
1491 by Charles C. Mann, sounds even more interesting than the rest. So much so, that I ordered it — and
Guns, Germs, and Steel — from the library today.
Charles Mann makes the best case yet, in non-technical prose, for the emerging archeological view that native Americans (north and south) had created vast cities and civilizations on a scale that dwarfed Europe at the time. These bustling cities, not just in MesoAmerica, but in the Mississippi and the Amazon, were erased into invisibility ahead of settlers (and textbooks) by disease and environmental factors.
