![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
corrielleI read both of these quite a while ago, but didn't have time to comment on them here.
16. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
I was listening to NRP like a good little liberal-leaning English teacher one day while I was driving to class, and the author of this book was on, talking about Cahokia, which is the site of what remains of an extraordinarily sophisticated pre-Columbian city right in the middle of Illinois. The size and scope of the city he was describing surprised me, and I wondered if reading his book might surprise me even more.
It did.
This book not only presents a great deal of archaeological research that has been done in recent years, but he also traces the history of the debates that are going on around the issue of Native American civilizations. While I wasn't exactly one of the students who learned in school that America was a completely untouched wilderness before the first European set foot in the New World, the levels of sophistication and population that some of the sources in this book suggest pre-Columbian cultures might have reached by completely rearranged my thinking.
Things that surprised me:
It is probable that there were more people living in the Americas than in Europe at the time of first contact.
Vast swaths of the Great Plains, the Amazonian rainforest, and other places that are usually conceptualized as being naturally abundant or useful show signs of some fairly complex, supportive human activity that made it that way.
Meso-American farmers invented corn through selective breeding. And by "invented" I don't mean "bred a slightly more successful or productive variety of corn than the one that occurs in the wild." I mean that the closest wild relative of domesticated corn is wildly different and not at all useful as a food source. Also, there are patches of land in Mexico and Central America that have been under constant cultivation for hundreds, maybe even a thousand years, and they are still productive because of the combination of crops being grown there and the care taken with the soil. That... boggles my mind.
The assumptions we make about unfamiliar societies reflect our biases as much if not more than they do any literal truth. (This worked both ways....)
History and archeology are intensely political. I knew that already, but this book slapped me in the face with it. The stories of academic infighting, egotism, and refusal to admit one might have been wrong are epic.
17. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
In the middle of the semester, I picked up another class from a teacher who was ill. She had assigned this book at the beginning of the semester, so I figured I was stuck with it, and so I had better read it. I ended up loving it.
This book is... the anti-Hallmark Special. It's sarcastic and biting and hysterically funny and doesn't flinch when it talks about death and ingrained racism and the utter absurdity of life. The main character, Arnold Spirit Jr., is a smart, kind of sickly kid on a Spokane Indian reservation whose environment isn't pushing him to do much more than grow up and turn into a drunk. So, he makes the unheard of decision to go to the "white" school in a neighboring town and get a better education, which makes him an outcast on the reservation and an outsider in his new school.
This easily could have gone Hallmark Special. But it doesn't. Because Arnold, who narrates the whole story, is constantly making acerbically brilliant comments that don't let the reader get too comfortable. The book occasionally includes some really funny caricatures that Arnold draws that go along with the plot of the book. I think my favorite is the one pointing out the features of interest on the wanna-be-Indian white guy who shows up at a funeral on the reservation. That scene... still makes me grin every time I think about it. It's hysterical, and the hardest I've ever laughed at the description of a funeral. Also, Arnold's adversarial relationship with his best friend on the reservation is well done. They're very much boys who are cruel to each other and fight and hurt each other and awkwardly patch things up later without really talking about it.
On the other hand, this book could easily have been angry and pessimistic with no hope in sight. But it's not that either. It manages to be real and inspirational at the same time. I don't quite know how Sherman Alexie managed that, but it worked really well. My students certainly liked it. Out of curiosity, I asked them to write about their reactions to the book as a whole, and if they would recommend it to other students, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Lots of them told me it was one of the first books they've ever read for school that they enjoyed, and others said they'd already made friends and family members read their copies.
So... good book. Quick read, but not complete fluff.
16. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
I was listening to NRP like a good little liberal-leaning English teacher one day while I was driving to class, and the author of this book was on, talking about Cahokia, which is the site of what remains of an extraordinarily sophisticated pre-Columbian city right in the middle of Illinois. The size and scope of the city he was describing surprised me, and I wondered if reading his book might surprise me even more.
It did.
This book not only presents a great deal of archaeological research that has been done in recent years, but he also traces the history of the debates that are going on around the issue of Native American civilizations. While I wasn't exactly one of the students who learned in school that America was a completely untouched wilderness before the first European set foot in the New World, the levels of sophistication and population that some of the sources in this book suggest pre-Columbian cultures might have reached by completely rearranged my thinking.
Things that surprised me:
It is probable that there were more people living in the Americas than in Europe at the time of first contact.
Vast swaths of the Great Plains, the Amazonian rainforest, and other places that are usually conceptualized as being naturally abundant or useful show signs of some fairly complex, supportive human activity that made it that way.
Meso-American farmers invented corn through selective breeding. And by "invented" I don't mean "bred a slightly more successful or productive variety of corn than the one that occurs in the wild." I mean that the closest wild relative of domesticated corn is wildly different and not at all useful as a food source. Also, there are patches of land in Mexico and Central America that have been under constant cultivation for hundreds, maybe even a thousand years, and they are still productive because of the combination of crops being grown there and the care taken with the soil. That... boggles my mind.
The assumptions we make about unfamiliar societies reflect our biases as much if not more than they do any literal truth. (This worked both ways....)
History and archeology are intensely political. I knew that already, but this book slapped me in the face with it. The stories of academic infighting, egotism, and refusal to admit one might have been wrong are epic.
17. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
In the middle of the semester, I picked up another class from a teacher who was ill. She had assigned this book at the beginning of the semester, so I figured I was stuck with it, and so I had better read it. I ended up loving it.
This book is... the anti-Hallmark Special. It's sarcastic and biting and hysterically funny and doesn't flinch when it talks about death and ingrained racism and the utter absurdity of life. The main character, Arnold Spirit Jr., is a smart, kind of sickly kid on a Spokane Indian reservation whose environment isn't pushing him to do much more than grow up and turn into a drunk. So, he makes the unheard of decision to go to the "white" school in a neighboring town and get a better education, which makes him an outcast on the reservation and an outsider in his new school.
This easily could have gone Hallmark Special. But it doesn't. Because Arnold, who narrates the whole story, is constantly making acerbically brilliant comments that don't let the reader get too comfortable. The book occasionally includes some really funny caricatures that Arnold draws that go along with the plot of the book. I think my favorite is the one pointing out the features of interest on the wanna-be-Indian white guy who shows up at a funeral on the reservation. That scene... still makes me grin every time I think about it. It's hysterical, and the hardest I've ever laughed at the description of a funeral. Also, Arnold's adversarial relationship with his best friend on the reservation is well done. They're very much boys who are cruel to each other and fight and hurt each other and awkwardly patch things up later without really talking about it.
On the other hand, this book could easily have been angry and pessimistic with no hope in sight. But it's not that either. It manages to be real and inspirational at the same time. I don't quite know how Sherman Alexie managed that, but it worked really well. My students certainly liked it. Out of curiosity, I asked them to write about their reactions to the book as a whole, and if they would recommend it to other students, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Lots of them told me it was one of the first books they've ever read for school that they enjoyed, and others said they'd already made friends and family members read their copies.
So... good book. Quick read, but not complete fluff.