The Journalist's Dilemma

Bibliographic Data

ID4492145
AuthorsCharles C Mann (0000-0002-1757-9552, Amherst, Massachusetts), Carl Mann (0000-0001-7212-1512, Amherst College, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume96
Issue3
Pages505-513
Publication date2006-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeographical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-7428 • E-ISSN: 1931-0846
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1931-0846.2006.tb00274.x
OpenAlexW2011994975
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited67

All authors hope to have their work liked, but even more they dream of writing something that readers believe worth thinking about. For me, this forum has been, by its very existence, enormously flattering, and I am grateful to all the contributors for taking the time to respond to my book. My deepest thanks to all of them. That said, I am unsure how to proceed. As rule, I don't respond to reviews. In writing book, I've had my say; after that it's time for others to have turn. Besides, authors' responses to criticism almost always sound defensive. Partly this is because lot of criticism boils down to (as I believe Dawn Powell put it) the critic saying that if he or she were driving my car, they'd take different direction. To this the writer ends saying, Well, your destination might be more interesting to you, but I wanted to go over here. Which translates into I, the author--not you, the critic--know best. The conversation is not terribly fruitful. Worse still, from the author's point of view, is when the criticism is spot-on. After the sudden discovery that one's book is out in the world with big flaws, and that there's not much to be done about it, few writers are capable of graceful repartee. Nevertheless, it would be churlish not to accept this forum's invitation, even though I know that what follows is, unavoidably, Response to Criticism, with all the attendant pitfalls. I trust that these comments are read as continuation of the discussion, rather than proclamation of the author's virtues. Also, I plan to steal Bill Doolittle's amusing observation about the evolution of the pop-top can as soon as I can find place for it. Tom Whitmore begins by observing that the tension between Mann the creative writer ... and Mann the science journalist ... [results in] coexistence [that] is occasionally awkward. It is indeed. My goal in writing 1491 was to introduce readers to body of scholarship that had convinced me that the pre-Columbian Americas were far more interesting and important than suggested by my son's American history course. I wanted readers to have good time and to read the whole book, but I also didn't want to leave out anything important. It would be surprising if I had been able to square the circle consistently. An example of the considerations involved is the passage (p. 130) for which Whitmore justly chides me for failing to cite Acuna-Soto, Romero, and McGuire 2000 (and the follow-up articles, Acuna-Soto and others 2002, 2004, and 2005). The lapse is unfortunate, given that the discussion on that page explicitly mentions the hypothesis by Acuna-Soto and his colleagues that some of the worst disease outbreaks in sixteenth-century were rat-borne hantaviruses or other hemorrhagic fevers. (1) According to my critic, I should have discussed the of these findings. The problem is, it's not clear what those implications are. When the original article came out, I thought of covering it for Science--my day job--and sent it to two epidemiologists whose acumen I respect. Both were skeptical (see also Cook 2004). Why, asked one, did this disease affect primarily the Indian as it spread across the country? (Acuna-Soto, Romero, and McGuire 2000, 733). If its symptoms were not consistent with known European and African diseases present in Mexico (Acuna-Soto and others 2002, 360), shouldn't the Spaniards, rather than being minimally affected by disease with a benign course (Acuna-Soto and others 2004, 2), have been virgin soil for the epidemic? (2) The other epidemiologist asked me to envision how rodent-borne virus could kill up to 80% of the native population (Acuna-Soto and others 2002, 360). That's lot of rats, he said. People must have been breathing in clouds of rat feces, the hypothesized transmission mechanism. In his view, high mortality figures argue for direct person-to-person transmission, rather than transmission through an animal vector--an argument strengthened by the absence of evidence for any rodent outbreak

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