Full Title: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Overall, 1491 provided a fascinating and fresh perspective on history as a lively, evolving field of knowledge--not the stuff of dry textbooks at all. My primary criticism of the book is that it is difficult to keep a sense of chronology without taking notes; the book is divided into different cultures and the research and theories behind their histories--not a chronological ordering of developments in the continents. Of the many useful illustrations, I'm surprised a standard time line was not included.

Having read Charles C. Mann's 1491 and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel back to back, I'm inclined to favor Mann's book over Diamond's. Although it's probably not fair to compare them in this manner, I actually set up a spreadsheet comparing differences in suggested dates for pre-Colombian historical events in the Americas, along with theories to explain them. (I should note that Mann actually cites two of Diamond's books, and not from a position of disparagement. It's just tempting for me to compare these books because of their proximity to one another on my reading list, so indulge me!)

Mann's book has the advantage of being written a decade after that of Diamond, and while some of the "new revelations" are fifty or more years old, some of them are very, very new--having been revealed within the last few years, or in some cases, still in the research stage. This time gap makes Diamond's assertions about the Americas seem more conservative and dated than they probably were at the time of publication. (One exciting revelation became apparent just last year, missing the cutoff for both books--pre-Colombian chicken bones from Polynesian chickens were found in South America, proving that Polynesians arrived in South America before European explorers! While both books referenced the theory that Polynesian watercraft may have reached the Americas, Diamond expressed more skepticism than Mann.)

The other factor which made me favor Mann's book over Diamond's was that the former is written from a journalistic viewpoint, whereas the latter is written with the intent to persuade the reader to believe the author's central theory. That isn't to say that Mann's writing is disinterested or dispassionate; his writing is sprinkled with praise and criticism of the various accounts of pre-Colombian life in the Americas he selected for inclusion in his book. Diamond, on the other hand, tries to weave the histories of all the populated continents into parallel narratives--narratives in which the losers are defeated by the guns, germs, and steel of the winners, and then he explains why he thinks the winners happened upon their tools of victory before the losers could acquire them.