Customer Reviews

Man's Rise to Civilization: The Cultural Ascent of the Indians of North America

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Peter Farb's book should be brought back into print: unfortunately, he's dead and so there's nobody to promote the book so probably no publisher will be interested. However, you'll find much of his work resurrected in Daniel Quinn's book "Ishmael" and Thom Hartmann's book "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," both brilliant works available here on amazon.com. All are highly recommended...

I read this bookfrom the public library some twenty years ago and was so impressed that I bought a copy from my local bookstore. I was not college educated at the time, but this book is so well written that it is easily understood by the average reader. Mr. Farb completely changed my ideas on the American Indian and civilization in the USA. I thought all indians lived in teepees and hunted buffalo and had this all-knowing spirituality. I was completely shocked to learn that they often slaughtered buffalo by running them off cliffs, and that some tribes lived by eating wild berries and whatever they could gather and slept under bushes at night. Of course there were those tribes that were spiritual and educated and had democratic societies. He explains and compares our society today to the American Indians civilization before the white man came to destroy them. It is a wonderful book and I am so sorry it is out of print. It should be published again. If Mr. Farb is still living I would like to be able to write to him and tell him what a profound impression he made.

Obviously inspired by respect and admiration for North American Indians, Peter Farb delineates the various ways in which cultures can answer the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of humans. It seems as though every aspect of human development is represented in this detailed overview. Equally impressive are the impoverished, bug-eating Ute philosophers and the thoroughly democraticized pre-Colonial Iroquois. This book should be read by every student of those things "American" as a pre-quel to our otherwise aristo(Euro)centric American History curriculum

The late Peter Farb's book made a great impression when I read it over twenty years ago and I frequently refer to its insights in my lectures on Environmental history.

Native Americans, like the Scythians, Sarmatians, Magyars, Mongols, Turks, etc., developed a common nomadic culture on the Plains once they had stolen the horse from the Spanish invaders. Like the cultures that proceeded theirs by some three millennia, they had a common tool-kit and life-style, while maintaining different languages and social structures.

Mr. Farb would have been horrified by the thoughtless change of Sioux for Comanche in the filming of the book, 'Dances With Wolves,' for the Sioux were descendants of the Woodland, settled peoples of the East, while the Comanche got the horse earlier, but were Uto-Aztecan nomads of the desert. A particular culture was a mixture and synthesis of all historical ingredients: Comanche lived in small groups that rarely coalesced into large military formations; the Sioux and Blackfeet lived in small goups when hunting, but were confederated into powerful military and economic organizations. In short they are as different as the Lithuanians are from the Romans.

That same film also created unnecessary misunderstandings that Farb's book tried to dispell: he displayed the common human origins of Indian and Western behaviors. The name 'Dances with Wolves' is not at all strange when you remember Mozart's first name Wolfgang.

The natives who traded Manhattan usufruct rights for glass beads were acting in the best traditions of human capitalism: glass beads were unknown to the New World and were visually far superior to found diamonds or rubies. The native trader going inland would get a very good return on each bead and the inland trader going further into the forest could justify giving that return because he would get an even greater return on his investment; thus, there was a very important rationality behind the American Natives' agreement to Dutch terms. They were only completely in the clutches of the Dutch when a glass bead factory was built in New Amsterdam!

Farb shows all enculturated individuals to be human and worthy of both admiration and scorn. It is a great lesson to learn toward the end of a millennium fraught with misunderstanding and the lack of formulation of basic principles for the evaluation of the Self and the Other.

Before reading this book, I had little knowledge about the Indians on this continent. This book is well written and very interesting. He goes into detail about their living situations, relationships within each group and with other groups, their governing, families, work ethics, etc. It should be required reading for history majors.

If you're like me and prefer to be presented with facts with which to make your own conclusions, you'll love this book. Farb presents the known anthropolgy of different groups of Amerindians, discusses various theories of group development and archaelogical history to describe how and why different groups of people developed in different ways. Yes, he does make summary conclusions that he believes are right, but he leaves enough room for the reader to consider other explanations. In this way, I prefer it to "Guns, Germs and Steel," which is so easy to just poke holes in.
While there is definitely an anti-european sentiment throughout the book, there is little glorification of the "noble savage." An eye-opening description of different groups from the most primitive (root-grubbing), to large, complex groups. The author also explains the migration of early peoples, along with climate-change in a cohesive presentation. You really feel that you understand what North America was like 9,000 years ago, and how that helped shape Amerindian history (of course, it also makes one question the future.)
It's an education in a paperback, superior in scope and more fact-based than most college classes. Thank you Amazon for making it possible for people to learn of these books and acquire them.

Farb's basic premise is that American Indians have ascended to the heights of culture (read: white culture) by 400 years of systematic genocide. That's what the book boils down to. Farb also makes numerous factual errors; e.g., he says the Mandan Indians are exitinct; umm, no, Mr. Farb, they're not.