'1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created' by Charles C. Mann

Finished July 2019

I very much enjoyed Mann's 1492, and therefore was excited to read the follow-up. The book offers a very interesting viewpoint on what Mann (and others) call the 'Homogenocene', which they postulate is our current era (rather than 'Holocene') and has been since Columbus landed and started a widespread ecological, societal and economic change we now refer to as globalism.

The book in part documents the history of this shift, as well as Mann's journeys to key locations that sparked it. I thought the ecological arguments were the most interesting and novel (how crops like the American potato caused political strife in China, or how the European mosquito altered the history of colonial America) and in several cases, helped me think of things I had never considered. Would recommend.