Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 11-14 of 14
 MANAHATTA June 11, 2009
Dudley Davis
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
Manahatta is a interesting book, it is loaded with little known facts about Manhattan, and it is especially valuable to anyone born or familiar with the island.
 Mind-expanding. May 7, 2009
S. Wilson (NYC)
27 out of 32 found this review helpful
Sprinkled throughout this book are 12 digitally-rendered aerial "photos" of New York in 1409, often featured as before-and-after comparisons of present-day Manhattan. These are beautiful and utterly fascinating images and are the heart of this volume and the program behind it (WCS's Mannahatta Project).
The book is also chock-full of historic and computer-rendered maps, wildlife and ecosystem photos and other illustrations. Sanderson's text is informative, entertaining and not preachy.
Through this excellent book, the reader not only learns about the natural history of NYC but sees it as a microcosm of the human impacts on landscapes across the continent and world.
The writing style and tone remind me of the excellent "World Without Us" but with the added bonus of being heavily illustrated.
I only wish that there were more of the large-format digital before-and-after Manhatta Project photos... a coffee table book would be justified!
Highest recommendation (and a must-own if you live in or love NYC).
A new way to understand NYC April 17, 2009
Adam J. Schwartz (Brooklyn, NY United States)
12 out of 23 found this review helpful
As someone who considers themselves a NYC buff, this book was incredibly useful for building my knowledge of the city. The deft combination of history, ecology, geology and geography, weaves a narrative that goes beyond the standard understanding of what NYC is, what it once was, and it what it can be.
 Not Quite What I expected April 15, 2009
Thomas Graves (Tokyo, Japan)
71 out of 84 found this review helpful
This is a heavy and substantial tome (inevitably printed in China - where else?) which details the author's amazing work in reconstructing the stunningly-beautiful natural environment of Manhattan Island in 1609, when the Dutch explorer Henry Hudson and his crew first laid eyes on it.
This much I already knew before purchasing the book, but frankly, I was disappointed when I actually got it. In part this is because the book seems to struggle to decide what it wants to be. A major portion does indeed deal with Manhattan Island in 1609. There are a number of amazing images put together with the latest computer-generated image technology after painstaking field research and with the 18th century British headquarters map. They depict a Manhattan so beautiful it brings tears to the eyes, particularly when you consider how totally the natural environment of the island has been destroyed. Still, I was left only half-satisfied, and would love to have seen something other than simulated aerial views, i.e. some neighborhood by neighborhood ground-level close-ups with descriptions (maybe they exist somewhere, but the link to the [...] website printed on the book's jacket didn't work; perhaps it's not up yet). But apart from reprints of historical paintings and drawings, there is less detail than I would have expected. Nor is there much discussion (apart from references to the laying-out of the grid street-plan and the grading involved) of the Manhattan archeological record, or of the massive and traumatic process of changing the primitive woodland paradise of 1609 into an unrecognizable agricultural and then urban environment. Since the earliest Dutch prints of New Amsterdam in the book already show a treeless tip of southern Manhattan, the colonists clearly wasted no time in proceeding with an aggressive program of land-clearing and filling. Perhaps few records exist, but it would have been interesting to learn more about how this happened, and how the deforestation progressed over the decades. For that matter, the calculated rapaciousness with which the natural environment of Manhattan was destroyed over 3 centuries also gets short shrift; to anyone acquainted with the degraded environment of NY City today & the meager environmental consciousness of its citizenry, Sanderson is oddly optimistic as he compares the 'natural biosphere' of the virgin landscape of 1609 to the 'human biosphere' of Times Square in 2009, and talks enthusiastically about a green NY which sounds more like Portland, Oregon.
Dr. Sanderson also digresses with lengthy chapters best described as philosophical ruminations on the nature of environmental research, the composition of biospheres, and the super-green Manhattan of 2409 (a wildly-optimistic scenario which combines elements of agriculture and a Disney 'city of tomorrow') only indirectly related to recreating Manhattan's lush original environment. The chapter on Manhattan's original inhabitants, the Lenni Lenape indians is fascinating, but only emphasizes how utterly the historical record of these people, who dwelt on Manhattan for hundreds of generations, has been erased.
Fully the last quarter of the book is a series of appendices, some of which are fascinating (catalog of the brooks, streams, and ponds of Manhattan), though one wonders whether so many lists were really needed.
Dr. Sanderson's enthusiasm for his topic comes through loud and clear. I just wish a bit more of it had been translated into the concrete and included in this book.
Showing reviews 11-14 of 14
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