Charles Mann has written an interesting book about what human civilization was like before Columbus. Much of this work, I understand, is necessarily speculative. However, the thorough work of Mann yields many insights worth the listening.

Listeners will need to pay closer attention to some portions of the text than they might be inclinded to do with other audio books. This is a history and portions of the book are involved. In any even, the listen will reward the patient.

This book provides an insight not common in history books. A view point almost as if from someone who was there as events unfolded. Totally unbiased,totally entertaining, totally enlightening.
A must-have for any complete library.

A great deal of interesting information...
I wish it had been presented in a more digestible manner.
Some reviewers loved it.
I suspect they might be ardent students of the subject.
For someone less involved but who wanted to be educated it is overwhelming and a disappointment.
It would work much better as a read.

Mann's point in this book is to bring to a wide readership the recent scholarship on the America's prior to Columbus. This is he does, and does well, and the reader is excellent. Still, this may be a book better read than listened to. Necessarily, the author ranges over a wide space both geographically and historically. The strangeness of names of places and people often made it difficult for this lay reader to follow complex passages.

But I heard enough to know this is a worthy and serious book. What's impressive in the end is how much we still don't know, how impressive is the knowledge gained for this place and time over the last 50 years, and how much is argued over between scholars, Native Americans, and enthusiasts when consensus doesn't exist. An excellent account of a time long past that remains so much a mystery despite the excellent work of many in different fields of expertise.

The book is enjoyable and interesting.

It is very poorly organized, jumps around a lot.

My main criticism, however, is that the author narrates for a long time about a given theory (e.g. that the flora in the Amazon basin was heavily influenced by pre-Colombian human presence) only to then say, that this may not be true after all, that just a few scientists (how respected? what do the leaders of the field think?) who believe so and many oppose them. As a reader you are not given the tools to choose for yourself, since seldom is the evidence that both sides of the debate interpret differently presented.

The problem is that later on is hard to remember if what you heard is a fact, a possibility, or something that only a couple of lunatics believe

It is hence a dangerous book to read, if you really want to learn, rather than just be entertained.

The book was interesting but was too long and repetitive. It would have been better if 2-3 hours were cut. Also, the fact that the native Americans left no written records makes much of this information speculative.

Don't write it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not make it a dry text book

Yes

All

Dry useless information read aloud.

It isn't easy to find an audiobook that both my husband and I will enjoy on a road trip, but this one filled the bill. It's an excellent account, written for the laymen, of the archaeological revelations of the past half century, and the ways in which they have revised our views of early Native Americans and the country that they inhabited. Unfortunately the story told in most textbooks has not kept pace with the current state of the art, so this book fills an important gap for anyone whose information is based, as mine was, on high school and introductory college courses.

Reads much more like a novel than a history text. 'Read' it, you're sure to enjoy 1491 if you have any affection for history.

1491 is less a history than an argument for the theory that the New World was vastly more populated than we all learned in school. Where did everyone go? Unimaginable epidemics. But that's not the real point of the book. The real point is betrayed by the way the author uses the word "environmentalist" as a slur. His thesis is that man has been altering the New World environment since time zero, and that efforts to preserve the environment are foolish attempts to return to a Neverland that never was. The antienvironmentalist screed becomes cloying long before one gets through this very long book. Also annoying, as another reviewer has noted, is the author's frequent technique of desribing -- at length -- the history of a period or place and then saying "NOT!" and giving quite a different set of interpretations.