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Overview
History and prehistory come alive in this extraordinary account of America as it was before it got its name. William H. MacLeish paints a heart-rending portrait of the lush, miraculous New World on the eve of the Encounter - the arrival of the first Europeans, after which nothing would be the same. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, geologists, and other academic experts, MacLeish roams over 18,000 years of the continent's history, exploring the role of climate and human activity in preparing the world that we have inherited. The Day Before America is studded with fascinating information on the awesome changes wrought by the ice age (and the inevitability of its return), the ecological effects of hunting and early agriculture, the astonishing variety of Indian civilizations, and the transformations in the continent's nature over the past five hundred years. It is a book informed by a deep commitment to the wonder and sacredness of the natural world. At bottom, it is a statement of belief in an unsentimental environmentalism - an effort to see our world in the longest view, and to value it all the more for that.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In a beautifully written meditation, Eco contributing editor MacLeish charts the ecological devastation and societal upheaval wrought by Spanish, French, English and Dutch colonizers of the New World. Drawing on interviews with ecologists, archeologists, prehistorians and anthropologists, as well as his own travels, he lyrically evokes the lush pre-Columbian Americas, where herds of caribou, mammoths and camels roamed in the late Pleistocene as glaciers melted. He also delineates a wide diversity of native cultures, such as the Calusa whale-hunters of the Pacific Northwest, the peoples who built huge burial mounds from Alabama to Ohio arund A.D. 1000, and the Chaco Canyon, N.M. housing-complex dwellers circa A.D. 500. MacLeish closes his highly personal essay with reflections on the destructive impact of contemporary Americans' high-consumption lifestyle. Illustrations. (Sept.)Library Journal
A storyteller with a penchant for history, MacLeish weaves a spellbinding tale about human life and environmental change in North America north of Mexico after about 15,000 B.C. Drawing on the work of archaeologists, paleobiologists, and the comments of Native Americans, he synthesizes what is known about the first Americans and their cultural evolution. In this personal odyssey, MacLeish addresses questions of human ecology, population growth, climate change, warfare, cultural morality, domestication origins, and a host of other issues of contemporary social and public policy. This unique and engaging essay will be of interest to the general reader.-William S. Dancey, Ohio State Univ., ColumbusBook Details
Published
September 1, 1994
Publisher
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Pages
264
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780395468821