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Title: Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples by Mark Cocker ISBN: 0-8021-3801-2 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 10 May, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: The Human Potential for Evil
Comment: If you are at all interested in the horrible history behind European conquest, this book will keep you interested. The author has summed up 4 examples of mass extermination by European settelers, each different in its own way and yet the same in drive and purpose. What I find most interesting about these events in history are the minds of the conquerers. How can people be so completely void of morals and values that they would support and contribute to the near extermination, and sometimes extinction of a human society? Though he obviously shuns these incredible slaughters in history, Cocker for the most part stays clear of personal opinion. He simply states the facts and the reasoning, and lets you try to get inside the heads of the conquerers. One section of the book concerns the Spainiards and the fall of the Aztecs in Mexico. The Spainiards were among the most ruthless, along with the Germans in Africa. This history was new to me, and I found it very interesting. Cocker writes a great section on the inhabitants of Tasmania, and how a few short years of European injustice and intervention wiped the indeginous people from the earth. His chapter on the American experience feels much different. Of the countless tales of Native American conflict and tragedy, he chooses to focus on Geronimo, who went from being a feared indian warrior to a western legend and a circus sideshow atraction.
This book was very informative, but it left me questioning what he chose to include and exclude. Of course, one could write endless books telling the history of indiginous suffering at the hands of Europeans- but why these 4? They all feel very different. The book reads much more like 4 short books than a whole. Nevertheless, this book achieves its purpose. Read this book expecting to be shocked and amazed at the level of cruelty humans are capable of, but don't expect to find any sort of answer as to where that leaves us today. As a person of European decent, I felt strangly guilty and responsible. I suppose that's just what the author intended.
Rating: 5
Summary: An Epic Tragedy. One of the Best Books I Have Ever Read.
Comment: The premise of the book has become so cliched that its fundamental truth has almost become obscured. Cocker uncovers in painstaking detail the results of European colonialism in four areas of the world. Without ever romanticizing the societies (the bloody nature of the Aztecs is particularly stressed) that are conquered, he paints a tragic picture that moved me to the point of tears more than once. A valuable antidote to apologists for European/Western Imperialism.
Rating: 4
Summary: simplistic
Comment: Crocker is a journalist who has previously proven his ability to write thoughtful, well-researched books that sell disappointing numbers. It is hard to blame the man for wanting to sell enough books to make some money. It is somewhat harder to take the amount of gore in Rivers of Blood, but one has to concede that he has the formula down. To sell books one must write about a) bad guys, b) harrowing, boodthirsty murder, c) really simple ideas. Here we have world class bad guys in the Europeans who set out to conquer the world by murdering all the people who lived everywhere else. The fact that these people fought back and sometimes won adds drama. But, hello? What about the role or European diseases, or the role of a European economic system that surely did as much as European weapons to destroy the non-European civilizations. Bloodthirsty conquest is as old as history. If the only thing that happened in the sixteenth century was that a bunch of European guys got on boats and set out to conquer other people, there would be no news to report. Mark Crocker misses most of the really important aspects of the Eurppean conquest of the world. I prefer my history more complex and closer to reality. Try reading Bullough's Pond if you really want to know what the American Indians were up against.
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Title: Stolen Continents: The "New World" Through Indian Eyes by Ronald Wright ISBN: 0395659752 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company Pub. Date: 01 February, 1993 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World (1300 to the Present) by Robert L. Tignor, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kokin, Suxanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, Stephen Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Michael Tsin ISBN: 0393977463 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $65.35 |
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Title: War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History by Avi Shlaim ISBN: 0140245642 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: "Exterminate All the Brutes" by Sven Lindqvist, Joan Tate ISBN: 1565843592 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild ISBN: 0618001905 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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