Caroline

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 My disappointment mainly stems from the lack of historical content - from the title I expected more of an historical overview, but that's mostly done in the first two chapters.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.

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.

This book is about the original Dutch colony founded on the island of Manhattan, originally called New Amsterdam. I knew it existed, but that was literally the limit of my knowledge - so this book was a real eye-opener. It charts the history of the colony: its internal struggles with the West Indian Company and its directors, mostly famously Peter Stuyvesant; the on-off again conflicts with the Native Americans; its rivalries with the neighbouring Swedish and English colonies; and its eventual takeover by England during the period breakout of war between England and the Netherlands. It also serves to highlight just how great the influence of the Dutch was in the founding of America - how New York was and always has been a very different creature to the other early cities, like Boston and Philadelphia.

I couldn't put this book down. It's as readable as a novel and twice as interesting. If only all non-fiction could be written like this. I don't think I've ever come across such a wonderfully written history book. Take this section for example:

This book invites you to do the impossible: to strip from your mental image of Manhattan Island all associations of power, concrete, and glass; to put time into full reverse, unfill the massive landfills, and undo the extensive leveling programs that flattened hills and filled gullies; to return streams from the underground sewers they were forced into, back to their original rushing or meandering course. To witness the return of waterfalls, to watch freshwater ponds form in place of asphalt intersections; to let buildings vanish and watch stands of pine oak, sweetgum, basswood, and hawthorne take their place. To imagine the return of salt marshes, mudflats, grasslands, of leopard frogs, grebes, cormorants, and bitterns; to discover newly pure estuaries encrusting themselves with scallops, lamp mussels, oysters, quahogs, and clams. To see maple-ringed meadows become numbered with deer and the higher elevations ruled by wolves. And then to stop the time machine, let it hover for a moment on the southernmost tip of an island poised between the Atlantic Ocean and the civilization of Europe on one side and a virgin continent on the other; to let that movement swell, hearing the screech of gulls and the slap of waves and imagining these same sounds, waves and birds, waves and birds, with regular interruptions by wracking storms, unchanged for dozens of centuries. And then let time start forward once again as something comes into view on the horizons. Sails.

When was the last time you read history written like that?