1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America by Gavin Menzies

This book purports to offer a revisionist history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Gavin Menzies (who served in the British navy) pulls together a variety of types of "evidence" that he claims prove that not only did the Chinese visit America before the Europeans, but that they circumnavigated the globe, establishing colonies and perfecting their navigational techniques. Menzies begins his book with the tale of the discovery of maps that purportedly offer correct details about the Americas and Africa before Europeans sailed there. The book is narrated in a style that follows Menzies discoveries--and then exclaims that this particular Chinese expedition is the only possible explanation for these discoveries. Light on footnotes and contemptuous of the academic establishment (excepting DNA testing and carbon-dating when they "prove" its conclusions), this book seeks to position itself as unveiling the truth academics have been hiding from the world for years. Unfortunately, Menzies's only area of expertise is navigational (he cannot read medieval Portuguese, Catalan, or Castilian--much less medieval Chinese), and he has a habit of establishing tantalizing possibilities and then assuming that they must be factual because they are possible.

The underlying message of the book is that the Chinese were far more civilized than the Europeans of that time (arguably true) and that they would have been better colonizers of the world than the Europeans (more dubious--especially since here Menzies enters the "what if" game). This message, and the book itself, tends to ignore the fact that people with their own cultures and civilizations were already living in the Americas and that they needed neither Chinese nor European colonization. Inviting people to re-evaluate European voyages of discovery is not a bad thing, but the fact that Menzies felt the need to re-write so much history in such a slipshod way to make that argument bodes ill for his ultimate belief in its power of persuasion.