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READ REVIEW * bookshelf * * Like Counts 2 * Share via Facebook * Share via Twitter * Share via Email * Print 1491 NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS by Charles C. Mann . RELEASE DATE: Aug. 12, 2005 Unless you're an anthropologist, it's likely that everything you know about American prehistory is wrong. Science journalist Mann's survey of the current knowledge is a bracing corrective. Historians once thought that prehistoric Indian peoples somehow lived outside of history, adrift and directionless, "passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way"; that view was central to the myth of the noble savage. In fact, writes Mann (Noah's Choice, with Mark L. Plummer, 1995), Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms; and their home continents "were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined." In defending this view, Mann visits several thriving controversies in the historic/prehistoric record. One is the question of pre-contact demographics: old-school scholars had long advanced the idea that there were only a few million Native Americans at the time of the Columbian arrival, whereas revisionists in the 1960s posited that there were eight million on the island of Hispaniola alone, a figure punctured by revisionists of revisionism, now beset by Native American activists for the political incorrectness of adjusting the census. Another controversy is the chronology of human presence in the Americas: the old date of 12,000 b.c., courtesy of the Bering Land Bridge in Alaska, no longer cuts it. Other arguments center on the nature of Native American societies such as the Aztec and Inca, the latter of whom built a great empire that, defying Western notions of logic, had no market component. Mann addresses each controversy with care, according the old-timers their due while making it clear that his sympathies lie, in the main, with the rising generation. He closes with a provocative thesis: namely, that the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, "living, breathing role models of human liberty." An excellent, and highly accessible, survey of America's past: a worthy companion to Jake Page's In the Hands of the Great Spirit (2003). * Like Counts 2 * Share via Facebook * Share via Twitter * Share via Email * Print Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2005 ISBN: 1-4000-4006-X Page Count: 480 Publisher: Knopf Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010 Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005 Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY Share your opinion of this book Did you like this book? * * [ ] Comment No Comments Yet More by Charles C. Mann * THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET * + BOOK REVIEW THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET by Charles C. Mann * 1493 FOR YOUNG PEOPLE * + BOOK REVIEW 1493 FOR YOUNG PEOPLE by Charles C. Mann ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff * 1493 * + BOOK REVIEW 1493 by Charles C. Mann * NIGHT * bookshelf * The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the... * bookshelf * * Like Counts 21 * Share via Facebook * Share via Twitter * Share via Email * Print NIGHT by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel . RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006 Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. * Like Counts 21 * Share via Facebook * Share via Twitter * Share via Email * Print Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006 ISBN: 0374500010 Page Count: 120 Publisher: Hill & Wang Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006 Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY Share your opinion of this book Did you like this book? * * [ ] Comment Show comments More by Elie Wiesel * FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT * + BOOK REVIEW FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen * THE TALE OF A NIGGUN * + BOOK REVIEW THE TALE OF A NIGGUN by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal * NIGHT * + BOOK REVIEW NIGHT by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel * TOMBSTONE * bookshelf * Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin's careful research and vivid writing. * bookshelf * * Like Counts 0 * Share via Facebook * Share via Twitter * Share via Email * Print TOMBSTONE THE EARP BROTHERS, DOC HOLLIDAY, AND THE VENDETTA RIDE FROM HELL by Tom Clavin . RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020 Rootin'-tootin' history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West's wildest city in the late 19th century. The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events--making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren't as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson "took the 'peace' in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull." Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most--Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday--died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren't really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren't particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. "It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens," he writes at one high point, "to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather." Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out. Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin's careful research and vivid writing. * Like Counts 0 * Share via Facebook * Share via Twitter * Share via Email * Print Pub Date: April 21, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4 Page Count: 400 Publisher: St. Martin's Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020 Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY Share your opinion of this book Did you like this book? * * [ ] Comment Show all comments More by Bob Drury * THE LAST HILL * + BOOK REVIEW THE LAST HILL by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin * TO THE UTTERMOST ENDS OF THE EARTH * + BOOK REVIEW TO THE UTTERMOST ENDS OF THE EARTH by Phil Keith with Tom Clavin * LIGHTNING DOWN * + BOOK REVIEW LIGHTNING DOWN by Tom Clavin more [loading-mo] kirkus nav logo * Discover Books FictionThriller & SuspenseMystery & DetectiveRomanceScience Fiction & FantasyNonfictionBiography & MemoirTeens & Young Adult Children's * News & Features BestsellersBook ListsProfilesPerspectivesAwardsSeen & HeardBook to ScreenKirkus TV videosIn the News * Kirkus Prize Winners & FinalistsAbout the Kirkus PrizeKirkus Prize Judges * Magazine Current IssueAll IssuesManage My SubscriptionSubscribe * Writers' Center Hire a Professional Book EditorGet Your Book ReviewedAdvertise Your BookLaunch a Pro Connect Author PageLearn About The Book Industry * More Kirkus Diversity CollectionsKirkus Pro ConnectMy Account/Login * About Kirkus HistoryOur TeamContestFAQPress CenterInfo For Publishers * Contact us * Privacy Policy * Terms & Conditions * Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy --------------------------------------------------------------------- * Contact Us * Privacy Policy * Terms & Conditions * Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy (c) Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. 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