The John Batchelor Show

Sunday 30 August 2015

Air Date: 
August 30, 2015

Photo, left: Interior of the opera house in Manaus, Brazil: the city that sprouted from the outside world's first discovery of rubber. (Interieur de l'opéra de Manaus © timuge Octobre 2008; "C'est incroyable de trouver un tel décor et de telles richesses en plein coeur de l'Amazonie.")
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“There’s a chain of events in this best of all possible worlds,” Dr. Pangloss says at the end of Voltaire’s “Candide.” “If you hadn’t been caught up in the Inquisition, or walked across America . . . you would not be here eating candied fruit and pistachio nuts.”
“True,” Candide answers. “But now we must tend our garden.”
Voltaire would have loved Charles C. Mann’s outstanding new book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. In more than 500 lively pages, it not only explains the chain of events that produced those candied fruits, nuts and gardens, but also weaves their stories together into a convincing explanation of why our world is the way it is.
Going one better than Voltaire, Mann’s book opens in a garden as well as closes in one. The first is Mann’s own in Massachusetts; the second, a Filipino family plot in Bulalacao. Despite being half a world apart, the two gardens grow many of the same plants, hardly any of which are native to either place. This, Mann tells us, is the hallmark of the ecological era we live in: the “Homogenocene,” the Age of Homogeneity.
1493 picks up where Mann’s best seller, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” left off. In 1491, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were almost impassable barriers. America might as well have been on another planet from Europe and Asia. But Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean the following year changed everything. Plants, animals, microbes and cultures began washing around the world, taking tomatoes to Massachusetts, corn to the Philippines and slaves, markets and malaria almost everywhere. It was one world, ready or not.
. . . Mann takes the argument into new territory by suggesting that only by understanding what Crosby called “the Columbian Exchange” — the transfer of plants, animals, germs and people across continents over the last 500 years — can we make sense of contemporary globalization.
. . . I, for one, will never look at a piece of rubber in quite the same way now that I have been introduced to the debauched nouveaux riches of 19th-­century Brazil, guzzling Champagne from bathtubs and gunning one another down in the streets of Manaus.
–-from the excellent review by Ian Morris (author of, Why the West Rules — for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future) in the New York Times
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Hour One
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block A: JFK, Conservative, by Ira Stoll (1 of 4)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block B: JFK, Conservative, by Ira Stoll (2 of 4)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block C: JFK, Conservative, by Ira Stoll (3 of 4)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block D: JFK, Conservative, by Ira Stoll (4 of 4)
Hour Two
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block A: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership, by Conrad Black (1 of 8)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block B: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership, by Conrad Black (2 of 8)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block C: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership, by Conrad Black (3 of 8)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block D: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership, by Conrad Black (4 of 8)
Hour Three
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block A: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership, by Conrad Black (5 of 8)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block B: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership, by Conrad Black (6 of 8)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block C: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership, by Conrad Black (7 of 8)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block D: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership, by Conrad Black (8 of 8)
Hour Four
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block A: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann (1 of 4)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block B: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann (2 of 4)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block C: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann (3 of 4)
Sunday 30 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block D: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann (4 of 4)