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summerseeds 's review for:
1421: The Year China Discovered America
by Gavin Menzies
Perhaps this book should have been called "1421: The year China Circumnavigated the Globe," because he talks about every other speck of land - big and small - to litter the ocean in conjecture with the Americas. He spends a ton of time talking about Australia. The topic wasn't quite as narrow as I had been led to believe. Which is fine. My problem is, while I agree with Menzies's general thesis that the Chinese were great oceanic navigators and there is evidence to suggest that the Europeans were probably not the first non-native people to land in the Americas, a significant portion of the "evidence" he gives is weak, circumstantial, and superficial at best. He has little in the way of hard facts, because apparently all chinese records for this time have been destroyed. For this reason, a lot of what he says is merely speculation and overreaching assumptions. Again, I agree with the general premise but perhaps not the way in which he reached his conclusions. I would have liked to have seen something more solid. It was an interesting read, though, and definitely gives you something to think about.