Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City | 
| Author: Eric W. Sanderson
Creator: Markley Boyer
Publisher: Abrams
List Price: $40.00
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Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 3542
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1St Edition
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.8
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 7.6 x 1.6
ISBN: 0810996332
Dewey Decimal Number: 508.7471
EAN: 9780810996335
ASIN: 0810996332
Publication Date: May 1, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
On September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson first set eyes on the land that would become Manhattan. It's difficult for us to imagine what he saw, but for more than a decade, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson has been working to do just that. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the astounding result of those efforts, reconstructing, in words and images, the wild island that millions of New Yorkers now call home. By geographically matching an 18th-century map of Manhattan's landscape to the modern cityscape, combing through historical and archaeological records, and applying modern principles of ecology and computer modeling, Sanderson is able to re-create the forests of Times Square, the meadows of Harlem, and the wetlands of downtown. Filled with breathtaking illustrations that show what Manhattan looked like 400 years ago, Mannahatta is a groundbreaking work that gives readers not only a window into the past, but inspiration for green cities and wild places of the future. Library Journal:"You don't have to be a New Yorker to be enthralled by this book. Highly recommended."
San Francisco Chronicle:
"[A]n exuberantly written and beautifully illustrated exploration of pre-European Gotham."
The New York Times Book Review:
"'Mannahatta' is a cartographical detective tale. . ."
"The fact-intense charts, maps and tables offered in abundance here are fascinating, and even kind of sexy. And the middle of the book, the two-page spread of Mannahatta in all its primeval glory-the visual denouement of a decade's research-feels a little like a centerfold."
"Upon closing the book you feel revved up, at the very least, and are likely to see a way to build a future that is more aligned with what once was than with what can no longer be."
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
 I Never Knew November 7, 2009
Jonah N. Rothleder
The images in this book are very good and the information found in its covers is truly revealing and indepth.
 great project, so-so book September 22, 2009
C. P. Anderson (Charlotte, NC)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Mannahatta project is basically an extremely detailed computer simulation of what Manhattan might have looked at on the eve of European discovery. The graphics are particularly cool.
That said, I think the project is a lot more interesting than the book. The book is okay, just rather plodding. It seemed like the author really didn't have that much to say and padded the book out with some very generic, rather flowery prose. Here's an example:
"Yet it is exactly these processes of destruction that keep nature refreshed and alive. Take the death of one of those huge old-growth American chestnuts on Mannahatta, perhaps already 350 years old that night that a big wind knocks it down. The next morning, the gap in the forest canopy floods the ground with sunlight, and all those younger trees that have struggled in the shade through the decades are let loose to grow as fast as they can toward the light. In the course of the twenty years it will take the trees to fill the place of that mighty chestnut, the sun-drenched meadow will accommodate ephemeral flowers and insects that wait for just this chance to reproduce. The meadow is drenched with birdsong from nests that dot its fringes; white-tailed deer graze the lush secondary growth, where wolves come to hunt. Even the dead body of the chestnut, laid to rest in the undergrowth, becomes a habitat for mushrooms and insects, the perfect burrowing place for chipmunks and ground squirrels - until a weasel comes to ferret them out. At night a great horned owl silently falls on the timid deer mouse, and the frost descends beneath the starry sky to eclipse delicate flower buds where once the mighty chestnut grew."
How much better it would have been if he had talked a little bit more about the project or about Manhattan. Just as an example, there is an excellent map of the streams that existed in 1609, but only about a page of specifics on them. Instead, we get this:
"Streams are the conduits for water flowing aboveground; springs form where the underground water flow breaks the surface. Both are fed by rainwater and snowmelt. The rain falls, running down the leaves, stems, and trunks of trees (known respectively as leaf flow, stem flow, and trunk flow; trees can hold up to nearly a quarter inch of rainfall, which is why they are a convenient place to hide when it begins to rain, but not later)..."
Ironically, there is a whole appendix devoted to moer specific info. Why wasn't that tied in to the main body of the text?
One final gripe ... In general, the illustrations are knock-outs. Some of the maps, though, are uninterpretable. Take, for example, the one on ecological communities, on p. 139. It shows 44 different communities, in 44 different shades of brown, green, and blue. How we're supposed to distinguish one from the other on the map is beyond me.
Overall, I think this could have been a great coffee-table book or a real read, but ended up trying to be both, and never really succeeded at being either.
Fantastic August 15, 2009
William A. Hudson (New York, NY)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Fantastic. In concept and execution, this is one of the most impressive books I've read in the past decade.
If I could turn back time . . . you might see something like this August 14, 2009
Todd Stockslager (Raleigh, NC)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Illustrations by Markley Boyer
Sanderson and Boyer turn detective to create a probabilistic time machine and show a plausible picture of what Manhattan could have looked like in 1609 when it was first seen by European eyes. While Boer's name is in smaller font on the cover, in reality he deserves at least equal billing because his photo-realistic overhead images of 1609 Mannahatta are spectacular enough to rate this a 5-star "What a classic!"
Sanderson's text is just detailed and scientific enough to enable the general reader to understand the difficulty of the effort and the detective nature of the work, without pulling the reader's eyes from the pictures too long. His explanation of finding the British Headquarters Map from the Revolutionary War and figuring out how to reference it to modern GPS data points to have a precise, high-resolution framework for the ecological extrapolations is better than the stuff of movies.
The paper, graphics, and binding are all first rate, making this book a pleasure to hold and study closely.
In some ways, this is a back-to-front version of The World Without Us, Alan Weisman's look forward to a post-human world. In both cases, the authors pick and extrapolate from available data, make realistic assumptions, and provide real-world comparative examples to show us interesting things about a world we will never be able to see without their vision.
Even if you are not from New York City and have only a passing interest in it as a place to live, work, or play, the rich natural and human history of the place make this a fascinating book to daydream over.
Mannahatta August 7, 2009
Kitty (PA)
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
Content is terrific, but the edition I got was printed in China on inferior paper and very inferior binding.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
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