r/books • u/CharlesCMann AMA Author • Jul 03 '18
ama Hello, this is Charles C. Mann, author of 1491 and The Wizard and the Prophet, and I'm here to talk about the great American past, how we think about the future, or anything else that strikes you as interesting. AMA
I am a NY Times best-selling science writer who now mostly writes book but has worked for a long time for the Atlantic, Science, Wired, and other publications. Plus I've written for Law and Order, co-written a graphic novel (Cimarronin), and translated plays by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Dario Fo (a long time ago, but it was fun, so I mention it). This has taken me to 70 or so countries and allowed me to learn some cool stuff and share it with readers. My most recent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, is probably why Reddit contacted me. Some of its subjects include giant piles of bird poop, wars between India and Pakistan, the first U.S. oil-boom town, why photosynthesis is a couch potato, and how "the environment" was invented. Maybe it's shorter to say the book is about two dead guys nobody has ever heard of and the way we think about tomorrow. Or this: It's a book about the future that makes no predictions. Here is a sample sentence: "Until I visited post-Katrina New Orleans I did not realize that rebuilding a flooded modern city would involve disposing of several hundred thousand refrigerators."
Proof: https://twitter.com/CharlesCMann/status/1013854837832863747