Caroline

A really valuable addition to Indigenous-European history. Too often this history is one-sided, very much the perspective of those Europeans encountering Indigenous people for the first time. Part of this is, of course, the difficulty of the historical record - few Europeans bothered to record Indigeneous thoughts, words or even their very presence, and little in the way of Indigenous records survived the genocide that accompanied the Colombian age, and even archecological records were intepreted, coloured and confused by European perspectives and beliefs.

This book highlights just how much trans-Atlantic traffic there was, how much of an Indigenous presence in Europe has gone ignored and neglected by European historians, beyond those individuals highlighted as ‘curiosities', ‘savages' or ‘spectacles', and how this skewed European focus turned many of these vibrant, still-living cultures and cvilisations into the stuff of museums and curiosity cabinets, the ongoing legacy of which still damages many Indigenous descendant cultures and communities today.

Could probably have done with being titled Homicide: The Biography, since it spent as much time talking about manslaughter and negligence and corporate liability as murder, but still a very good read!

My abiding impression of this book? I'm impressed the author manage to cope living so long in the company of the various Adams men of the third and fourth generations (the first two were Presidents John and John Quincy Adams). Because, for real, the Adams men were DICKS. Entitled, self-absorbed, emotionally stunted dicks.

Limited in scoop and not a great deal of depth to it. Focuses on the lives of some of the children of senior Nazis (Mengele's son, Hess' son, Goring's daughter etc), but it's all based on second-hand material and doesn't spend a great deal of time on any of them. Very little attempt at any kind of real psychological insight on the impact crimes of this nature have on a child. Overall an interesting topic but disappointing in execution.

I wavered between 3 and 4 stars for this book. On the one hand it's an excellent, searing indictment of food politics in the US, and how government and big business uses food to both deliberately and indirectly perpetuate racial inequalities. My disappointment mainly stems from the lack of historical content - from the title I expected more of an historical overview, but that's mostly done in the first two chapters. I think there's so much to be said historically about food in history, that I was greatly disappointed in the relatively sparse treatment it got in this book, in comparison to the 20th/21st century assessments.