Hacker News Books

I highly recommend "Empire of the Summer Moon"[1], a fascinating account of the final decades of the Comanche tribe.

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...

Very fascinating find. Having just finished reading Empire of the Summer Moon, I would not have wanted to be anywhere near the Southern Plains areas in 1857.

The Commanche were also particularly effective at it. The combination of their horse riding and archery skills made them more lethal than the US Army, until the revolver was invented. Before the revolver, firing on horseback was a non-starter because reloading was almost impossible; a Commanche could fire dozens of arrows in the time it took one reload. I read about this in the book "Empire of the Summer Moon" by S. C. Gwynne.

> In the book he describes the ways modern life has disconnected us from a lot of what humans find meaningful, and given that it's not surprising that rates of depression and anxiety have skyrocketed.

Yeah. See Yvain's excellent review of "Empire of the Summer Moon":

All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.

There was much to like about tribal life. The men had no jobs except to occasionally hunt some buffalo and if they felt courageous to go to war. The women did have jobs like cooking and preparing buffalo, but they still seemed to be getting off easy compared to the white pioneer women or, for that matter, women today. The whole culture was nomadic, basically riding horses wherever they wanted through the vast open plains without any property or buildings or walls. And everyone was amazingly good at what they did; the Comanche men were probably the best archers and horsemen in the history of history, and even women and children had wilderness survival and tracking skills that put even the best white frontiersmen to shame. It sounds like a life of leisure, strong traditions, excellence, and enjoyment of nature, and it doesn't surprise me that people liked it better than the awful white frontier life of backbreaking farming and endless religious sermons.

Whites who met Comanches would almost universally rave about how imposing and noble and healthy and self-collected and alive they seemed; there aren't too many records of what the Comanches thought of white people, but the few there are suggest they basically viewed us as pathetic and stunted and defective.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/history/2012-11-13-yvain-bookrevi...

""(in reference to the tribal organization of Native American tribes, where in fact there was exactly one Chief who was the final arbiter)""

AFAIK absolutely false. It is also a gross generalization about a diverse group of people with differing sociopolitical structures.

I would suggest reading "Empire of the Summer Moon" for an example of a famous and incredibly egalitarian American construct, or just read about Iroquois political structures via Googling, for two examples.

http://www.cokesbury.com/forms/ProductDetail.aspx?pid=939760...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois

I'm hoping to tackle this list in 2020, I've been wanting to read Caro's LBJ series for a while now.

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Robert Caro - Lyndon B. Johnson series & The Power Broker

S.C Gwynne - Empire of the Summer Moon

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Black Swan & Antifragile

Graham Hancock - America Before

Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel

Safi Bahcall - Loonshots

There’s a lot of evidence indicating little to no contact and a paucity of evidence suggesting otherwise. So much so that “a” find like this is big news - a bead from the 15th century. It would not be big news if these things were found regularly, and they haven’t been, and people have been looking in earnest.

I don’t understand why you would find the conclusion to be insulting or condescending. Do you feel some bias has covered up information or that there is a wealth of contact indicia as yet unfound?

At the time of European contact, the written and archeological records both seem to agree that the indigenous population in North America was a Neolithic one. Some regions West of the Mississippi (out in the dry plains) were even Paleolithic. Even while there is evidence suggesting the Chinese made it to Alaska, and the Vikings to the East Coast much earlier than Columbian contact, it obviously was too expensive to stay. While trade goods trickled out to these far ends of the network, their paucity indicates that there was little worth trading for that far out that couldn’t be found elsewhere for less. In other words, even if western and eastern civilizations knew about the Americas an eon ago or more, the trade routes weren’t valuable enough on the balance to maintain.

I suggest you think of this as a highly valuable distinction for the study of mankind. The indigenous populations of the Americas were human, the same as you and I today. They were wicked smart, capable, and well-adapted to living in insanely hostile conditions. Their until-recent isolation helps inform the understanding of all human societies in time. It further enables every human on earth confront themselves. Two books I would recommend to stir a fascination with these early cultures: Thundersticks by David Silverman, and Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynn. These contain accessible descriptions of life before the 19th century Plains Indian Wars, which dominates a lot of people’s ideas about the indigenous Americans. In fact, European contact goes back another three centuries and there’s some fascinating, wondrous history and insight in those earliest periods of contact.

I'm also reminded of the dynamic between the Native Americans and the European colonist-settlers, in particular Scott's review [1] of the book Empire of the Summer Moon [2].

    And throughout the book's description of these events, 
    there was one constant:

    All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it
    and refused to go back to  white civilization. All the 
    Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did 
    everything they could to go back to their previous tribal 
    lives.

[1] http://squid314.livejournal.com/340809.html

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/...