Chenel Morrison
April 25, 2018
Short Review on 1421
1421 by Gavin Menzies, is listed under “Worst historical non-fiction” along with other books such as Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and Hitler is Winning by Jerry Leonard. I find this both amusing and strange, since 1421 is a book that contrasts ideologically with the other two books listed above, in terms of Eurocentrism.
When I started 1421, I knew it was a controversial book with controversial ideas, and perhaps this is also the reason that I kept reading. Taking the book at face value, it propagates the idea that the Chinese Admiral Zheng He visited the Americas prior to European explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492, as well as circumnavigating the world before the Ferdinand Magellan expedition, and throughout the book Menzies was actually quite persuasive with his evidence and arguments.
Proposed Voyages Map reconstructed by Menzies
His evidence included DNA tracing, local flora comparison between South American and Chinese, as well as obscure written accounts. Looking past face value, and perhaps where the controversy lies, is its position against the Europeans discovering the Americas. While reading though the reviews of the book on Goodreads, I could not help but wonder how much of the dismay and dislike of this book laid in people’s attachment to eurocentrism. One reviewer recommended it to “knee-jerk European Culture-haters” after giving the book two stars out of five. That being said, I gave the book a three star rating, because although Menzies was persuasive in his arguments, whenever he mentioned his evidence, many times I thought “well, that could be interpreted differently.”
And that is the main thing I learnt from this book; although academic research and analysis should be objective, it can’t be ignored that most people (even academics) are quite subjective and can’t help but analyze evidence to fit a certain story. If Menzies is proposing that all the academics before him were wrong about who discovered the Americas, then it is only fair to assume that he too can be wrong, at least about something. Although I finished the book fascinated by his argument, I was not entirely convinced by Menzies’ arguments, but it did make me question a lot of things about world facts and how world history (at least how it is thought in classroom) should not be taken as face value. I am not saying that we should disbelieve what we are taught, but instead we should keep in the back of our mind that we are usually given the simplified version of the stories of the lives and events that occurred before us, and that we could be wrong about some of the details. We will never really know all the details and “facts” for certain.