This is deservedly a classic work of history even though it is recent. We believe all sorts of things that just are not true about the world of the western hemisphere. Much of this is due to essential racism, since we cannot believe that the people who lived here before the Europeans arrived could have developed large and complex societies. But as this book shows, they did indeed. And it was not our superior civilization, or gunpowder, or other military advantages of the Europeans that allowed them to conquer this hemisphere, it was their diseases that brought down what was in some ways a superior civilization.