Remember Fourth Grade? Sister Mary Anne taught us to singsong "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety two." Then we skipped to Jamestown in 1607. Did you ever get the feeling that we had missed a lot of something somewhere? Well, boys and girls, we surely did! Charles C. Mann has given us a marvelous account of the events that occurred that directly relate to what he calls the Columbian exchange. Now most of us have a vague idea that the invasive European powers brought some unwelcome gifts like influenza and small pox. Most of us have a faint awareness that foods like the potato and tomato crossed to Europe from the Americas. Almost everyone knows that the Spaniards looted for gold and silver. But the things we don't always know may have caused more world shaking events. It was not simply gold doubloons that powered the rise of Western Europe. Trade in items like pineapple, sweet potatoes, blue and white Ming porcelain, ladies' fans of silk and lace, and people, enslaved and free, but mostly in some form of servitude. Mann recounts stories of the deadly silver mines of Potosi, the Manila Galleons, the trade in sugarcane, natural rubber and mosquitoes. He recounts his stories with clarity and wit. This book is easy to read and easy to love. It's full of really neat stuff!