Reviews
decent overall, and it definitely had some good factoids, but I think that the author gets a bit over his skis at times (comparison of firepower between the old and New World, philosophy, extent to which Iroquois government inspired American democracy, etc.). it also may be a fact of the current understanding of current topics, but I found it frustrating to have him introduce one theory for a certain topic, then debunk that theory and offer an alternative theory, and then not come to a conclusion. Given how often the author shares his beliefs elsewhere it was jarring when he wouldn't do it here, where it probably would've been most useful
There is plenty of interesting information in this book, especially for those not already aware of the near extermination of native Americans by diseases, mainly smallpox, introduced by European explorers. The fact that native Americans had large cities in Amazonia and elsewhere should really not surprise us, since there were large cities in other tropical areas, like Angkor Wat, but it is not the history most of us learned in school. It was also interesting to me that Anna Roosevelt, Theodore's grand-daughter played a key part in establishing that cities did exist in Amazonia, since I am endlessly fascinated by TR, and because he led an early, epic, and nearly fatal expedition to the Amazon. But once the main ideas have been laid down in the book, it drags, in my opinion. It seems the author was looking for ways to fill pages after a certain point, and this kind of writing where original points are repeated, perhaps amplified, but nothing new presented, wears me down. Hence the three star review, which is maybe a bit harsh, but honestly by the last third of the book I was simply waiting for it to end, even though the first half was relatively interesting.
I liked how the book is shedding lights on many topics and angles that you wouldn't usually find in the mainstream when it comes to the native Americans and how they built their own civilization in isolation from the rest of the world, yet I couldn't help being bored by the repetitive paragraphs over and over again. Also, I didn't like how the author insists on comparing civilizations! You can highlight how a civilization is great without putting it in comparison with another civilization to undermine it. Especially if your claim lacks evidence
This book would be a great aid to insomniacs...the audiobook version at least. The narrator chosen for this book was horrible. His pronunciation and syntax both suffered mightily through the reading of this book. I think that also colored my opinion of the book in general. The book appears to have no orienting focus. I may have missed the logical transitions between different eras and locations because I was not engaged in the audiobook. In he long term, this meant that I really didn't care how the book was drawn to a close. One thing that I did notice was that at times, the author appeared to propose a popular assumption, disprove the theory, propose another, disprove that by saying that the original proposal might have been true. Way too confusing.
Highlights
Doubtless her political anxieties are not without justification, although-as some of her sparring partners observed it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats "perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chainsaws." But the new picture doesn't automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fxed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
*Actually, it didn't. Inexplicably, the biggest unit, the 144,000-day "millennium, began with 13, rather than o. The first day in the calendar was thus 13.0.0.0.o. When I remarked on the peculiarity of this exception to a mathematician, he pointed out societies whose timekeeping systems are so irregular that children have to learn remember the number of days in the months ("Thirty days hath Sep- tember...) are in no position to scoff at the calendrical eccentricities of other cul- tures. At least all the "months" in the Mesoamerican calendar had the same number rhyme: of days, he said.
He was an indefatigably industrious man who wrote some four hundred articles and books; founded the American Journal of Physical Anthropology; forcefully edited it for twenty-four years; and collected, inspected, and cataloged more than 32,000 skeletons from around the world, stuffing them into boxes at the Smithsonian. By temperament, he was suspicious of anything that smacked of novelty and modish- ness. Alas, the list of things that he dismissed as intellectual fads included female scientists, genetic analysis, and the entire discipline statistics
About Anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka