January 12, 2012
1493
I accidentally finished reading 1493 last night, and loved it. But first, a detour about e-books.
This is the first time a book has been victimized by e-book-ification for me. The author or publisher clearly went to some length to make the book "e-book friendly", but the result is actually worse than if they had left it alone.
There are at least a dozen maps and charts mixed in with the narrative, and they look like they might be interesting, but they're too small to read. Each one has a helpful link underneath saying "Click for larger version". Clicking the link takes you to a separate page, with the image about 10% larger, and no added detail. I tried using the e-book's zoom feature, but the images just pixelize -- there's no actual detail there. The image was destroyed in the process of making the file.
Footnotes are similarly awkward. You have to click on a very tiny little link (usually I had to pull out the stylus for accuracy), and it just takes you to a separate page where the footnote is written in a tiny font. When you're done, you need to navigate through three tiers of menu to get back to where you left off. It's hard to understand what the intent was. If the footnote popped up in a dialog, you could read and dismiss it without losing your place. Or if they had just put the footnote at the bottom of the current page like a paper book, it could be in a tiny font but easily discoverable without interrupting the flow of reading. Instead, it's got the worst of all worlds.
Finally, the book is 450 pages long, though it appears to be nearly 700 in an e-reader. This is apparently because over 200 extra pages are needed to hold the dysfunctional maps and a vast number of unreferenced notes. I suspect the original text was supposed to reference the notes inline somehow, but the e-reader people, who had just faced an existential crisis in trying to figure out how to fuck up the footnotes, just threw up their hands and dumped all the notes at the end.
In short, I begrudgingly recommend that you buy this book in paper form, which kinda invalidates the very idea of e-readers.
The book itself is incredible. I read the introduction while I was still in the middle of reading a different book, and I couldn't put it down. I think I plowed through 50 pages a day at one point.
It covers the "Columbian Exchange", a term scientists use to describe the ecological changes that started when Europeans and Africans first visited the Americas. The author, Charles Mann, claims that a new ecological era began the day Columbus landed on Hispaniola: the Homogecene, an era when all parts of the earth began to intermingle and become the same.
Mann doesn't really try to prove anything. Instead he tells a series of anecdotes that weave together in a convincing way. The book is so full of fascinating stories that I peppered my friends with them incessantly for a month. Some quickies: Africans outnumbered Europeans in America for over 300 years. Jamestown was so malaria-ridden that colonists warned the English companies that at least 3/4 of any new arrivals would be killed in their first year. They called it "seasoning". Inflation from Spanish silver probably wrecked China's economy.
See? It's full of these. Each chapter covers a single topic in detail, but the stories are all interconnected in the way that the world has become. I also appreciated that even though Mann has an opinion about cause and effect, and is trying to convince us of the truth of the Homogecene, he doesn't take sides on the hot topics of the day, like globalization. He meets with farmers, scientists, environmentalists, and government officials, and lets them tell their stories, but doesn't moralize.
In the coda, he describes the plight of terrace farmers in the Phillipines. The terraces are endangered by earthworms unleashed by the Columbian Exchange, but they were probably built by people fleeing the Spanish-Chinese battles in Manila. How do you preserve a way of life that is itself a product of the destruction of an older way of life? There often isn't a good guy or bad guy. In the words of Marge Simpson, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened.