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This book is frustrating. It is an interesting subject and it is both well written and well documented. So if you come a cross some factoid that you wonder about - there is enough material in the text (but not in footnotes) that you can trace the topic back to its source. But the tone of the text lends a certain skepticism. Mr. Mann is an advocate not just an observer. He takes the position that the Indians who occupied the Americas before Columbus were good and the Europeans who came across the oceans at the end of the fifteenth century were bad. He has a lot of scholarship but his has a persistent anti-white bias that make the whole book questionable. Let me give a simple easy to understand example. He writes (on page 136) that the worst calumny against the Aztecs is the charge of human sacrifice. Mann admits that the Aztecs (which he calls the Triple Alliance) did commit human sacrifice but equates it with the Spanish Auto-da-fe. there are several problems with this account. First Human Sacrifice was not and never has been main atrocity attributed to the Aztecs. The Aztec practice that he totally ignores is cannibalism. Secondly the Spanish auto-da-fe kills only a relatively small number of people whereas the Aztec body count in their ceremonies was much larger. And of course many authorities think the reason the Aztecs were constantly at war with their neighbors was for meat. Wikipedia states that all the victims of the Spanish Inquisition over the entire period of the Counter Reformation were probably only about 3,000 victims. Wikipedia also cites authorities including Victor Davis Hansen that the annual number of human sacrifices by the Aztecs alone was at least 20,000 and may have been as high as 84,000. And you must remember that the Maya and other groups were also holding their own slaughters. The Spanish Inquisition took place for a few years and then stopped. The Mesoamerican human sacrifices took place annually for centuries. Another difference is that the Auto-da-Fe was for adults only whereas the Aztec and the Maya seemed to prefer to sacrifice children. Go to the Yucatan and the tour guides will show the holes where the Maya threw teenagers every year to bring rains. Most modern readers find it hard to admire the Aztecs because they seem to have been a large scale cannibal culture. On page 141 Ma section labeled " Assigning Blame". Not surprisingly Mann assigns the decimation of New World Indians to the Europeans who introduced Small Pox and other diseases. But this is a myopic judgement. Small Pox may have begun in China. We can't be sure but we do know that Small Pox decimated China and brought an end to the Han Dynasty. Shortly thereafter Small Pox got to Rome (the Antonine Plague) and brought about the decline of the Roman Empire. Small Pox stayed in Europe and Asia for another thousand years . Not surprisingly when Europeans got across the Atlantic they had no choice but to bring Small Pox with them. Five hundred years later white people found a cure for Small Pox and exterminated the virus. You would think that whites rather than being blamed, whites should be thanked for their medical science. The Indians in the New World were victims of Smallpox. It destroyed their civilization just as it had earlier destroyed the civilizations of Rome and China. Fortunately white men found a cure.