Each of these books attempts to peel back the layers of European contact and colonialism and offer a different view of the Americas. Charles C. Mann tries to reconstruct the Americas before European invasion; Julian Granberry imagines how the Americas might have evolved without European invasion.

Granberry, a linguist, focuses on kinship systems and divides human societies into three types: unitary, dualistic, and trinary. Unitary societies see only one solution for any situation; dualistic societies see two, polarized solutions, one good, one bad; and trinary societies see good and bad solutions but prefer to pursue a third, compromise solution. Granberry draws examples from all over the world to slot peoples into these categories (in China, a unitary society, for instance, concepts of good and bad, right and wrong “do not exist, as they do with us, as simple, clear universal polar opposites”[50]), and he finds evidence from historic and contemporary events to support his case. He then identifies half a dozen Native