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The Red-Haired Woman - Orhan PamukSaturated with sympathy and sense of place, the book charts a boy's journey into manhood and Turkey's into irreversible change' Financial Times'An ending that makes you immediately start the book all over again.' The Sunday Times 'Enchanting.' Wall Street Journal'Many years have now gone by, and jealousy compels me to keep her name a secret, even from my readers. But I must provide a full and truthful account of what happened.'A studious young man
Saturated with sympathy and sense of place, the book charts a boy's journey into manhood and Turkey's into irreversible change' Financial Times'An ending that makes you immediately start the book all over again.' The Sunday Times 'Enchanting.' Wall Street Journal'Many years have now gone by, and jealousy compels me to keep her name a secret, even from my readers. But I must provide a full and truthful account of what happened.'A studious young man spends a summer helping a master well-digger search for water on a barren plain. As the two struggle in the summer heat, they develop a filial bond neither has known before. In the nearby town where they spend their evenings, a travelling theatre group has come to stay. The young man is fascinated by the Red-Haired Woman, an alluring member of the troupe, and their brief but intense love affair drives everything else from his mind. But in his distraction, a horrible accident occurs, which will haunt him for thirty years. Until he decides to track down the Red-Haired Woman and finally understand the fallout from that unforgettable summer . . .
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4.1 ★★★★★
Based on 1508 reviews
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Product Reviews
★★★★★ 5
LOVED This Read! Blew Me Away
Format: Hardcover
What a fantastic read! Woah. All of the Americas have an extraordinary history. I was mesmerized from beginning to end. If you like knowing your history, you will love this book. Well researched and smartly written. Couldn't put it down. Books like this are why people love to read. If you think you know the Americas, you might be surprised to find that there's more, and be prepared for a bit of a shake up. This book was a real eye opener.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2025
★★★★★ 4
A Brave New World
Format: Hardcover
It wasn't quite what I expected, but Charles Mann leads the reader on a fascinating journey in the wake of Columbus, focusing mostly on the environmental impact of his "discovery" of the New World. Mann literally spans the globe, as the establishment of Spanish colonies in the Americas would have far reaching consequences.
Most interesting to me was how silver came to be the currency of exchange, allow Spain to trade with China, when it established its trading outpost in the modern-day Philippines. Along with silver, came corn, rubber and potatoes which would radically alter the landscape of the world. Mann discusses how corn came to replace rice for many Chinese, and how rubber trees would be transplanted to Indochina, bringing with them unsuspected pests that would wreak havoc on ecosystems. In this sense, the book has similarities with Jared Diamond's
but explores different terrain. One of the most interesting chapters was on the highly profitable mining of bird guano and how the British cornered the market in this new fertilizer. Mann describes how the shift to mono-cultures had a tremendous impact on agriculture. At first, these new crops seemed to solve much of the world's food shortages, but then as the Irish famine made all too painfully aware, putting all your "eggs in one basket" can lead to devastating consequences as an unforeseen blight wiped out much of Ireland's food supply.
Mann also offers a long study on how slavery evolved and re-shaped the ethnic identity of many countries, particularly those in Central and South America. The miscegenation that took place, with particular focus on Brazil, reshaped cultural patterns and changed the political dynamics in these countries. He offers a number of intriguing case studies, and discussed the long term impact of this human cross-pollination. 1493 is a fascinating study and meditation on life after Columbus. We don't fully realize how rapidly the world changed after this fateful "discovery," and how continents became so interdependent, where before they had been relatively isolated from each other.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2012
★★★★★ 5
Great History book
Format: Paperback
This book was a gift for husband. He loves it. He is a slow reader, but he can’t put book down. New and interesting history facts and stories.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2026
★★★★★ 5
Consequence After Consequence
Format: Hardcover
"In Fourteen Hundred Ninety Two, Columbus Sailed The Deep Blue Sea" is a ditty sung by generations of school children. Most of those students learned and believed that Columbus was the only man in Europe who believed the world was round and proved it by sailing three ships west to find the East. In 1493, Charles C. Mann dismisses these legends and goes on to demonstrate that Columbus (or as he refers to him, Colon) and the other Europeans who sailed across the Atlantic in the 1400s and 1500s did far more than just discover a New World, they helped create a planet wide system in which people, plants, animals, and diseases travelled further and were linked in more ways than had ever before been possible. In other words, 1493 was the beginning point of a new age of globalization.
This is not a new theory. Alfred W. Crosby developed the term Columbian Exchange back in the 1970s to describe the changes that took place after 1492. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse also detailed some of the consequences of the European "discovery" of the Americas. What makes Mann's new book so appealing is his ability to tell an engrossing story that ably explains how one consequence led to another, fundamentally changing society after society and helping to creat our modern world. This is global history at its best, jumping from Ming and Qing China's opulent but troubled societies to the fast growing but still relatively backwards European states to the myriad African and Native American cultures, all of them to be affected by the transfer of peoples, plants, diseases, and ideas. Mann has a keen eye for an appealing and informative anecdote which really details the consequences of seemingly small decisions, such as how the introduction of the sweet potato to China led to deforestation, or how the Little Ice Age was affected by the abandonment of the Native American practice of burning off underbrush in North American forests.
Its books like 1493, as well as Mann's earlier and equally excellent 1491, which make studying history so fascinating. I taught Advanced Placement World History to high school students for many years before retiring, and I regularly amused them (at least I hope I did) with many references to Jared Diamond and Alfred Crosby's ideas. With 1493 Charles C. Mann deserves equal recognition by global historians.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2011
★★★★★ 5
Mesmerizing; shows the butterfly effect in action
Format: Paperback
Charles Mann’s “1493” is about globalization and the Homogenocene epoch. Unlike the plenitude of other recent books about globalization, however, “1493” is about biological globalization rather than economic globalization. The book traces the results of the Columbian Exchange, with chapters devoted to tobacco, the earthworm, malaria, silver, potatoes and sweet potatoes, guano and rubber.
The book is in four parts, and is written in an accessible, non-academic style. I found the first three parts of the book, which cover the impact of the Columbian Exchange on the Atlantic, the Pacific and Europe, respectively, to be captivating. These parts of the book demonstrated the fascinating interconnectedness of all things in a globalized society (in other words the “butterfly effect”) – for example, how transporting the sweet potato to Western China led to population migrations from Eastern to Western China, deforestation and overflowing of the Yellow River. The general result of such biological globalization is the creation of the Homogenocene epoch, a term which Mann uses to describe the biological homogenization that has replaced biological diversity since the time of Columbus. In the first three parts of the book, Mann demonstrates how history, biology and chemistry are all interrelated, and how today’s world continues to be influenced by the Columbian Exchange.
I found the last part of the book to be less impressive than the first three parts. Part Four is called “Africa in the World,” but confusingly it is about South America, not Africa. Parts of it read more like travel writing than history. Still, the book deserves five stars for the first three thrilling parts, which successfully trace the mesmerizing history of various everyday biological substances.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2017