If you are at all interested in the horrible history behind European conquest, this book will keep you interested. The author has summed up 4 examples of mass extermination by European settelers, each different in its own way and yet the same in drive and purpose. What I find most interesting about these events in history are the minds of the conquerers. How can people be so completely void of morals and values that they would support and contribute to the near extermination, and sometimes extinction of a human society? Though he obviously shuns these incredible slaughters in history, Cocker for the most part stays clear of personal opinion. He simply states the facts and the reasoning, and lets you try to get inside the heads of the conquerers. One section of the book concerns the Spainiards and the fall of the Aztecs in Mexico. The Spainiards were among the most ruthless, along with the Germans in Africa. This history was new to me, and I found it very interesting. Cocker writes a great section on the inhabitants of Tasmania, and how a few short years of European injustice and intervention wiped the indeginous people from the earth. His chapter on the American experience feels much different. Of the countless tales of Native American conflict and tragedy, he chooses to focus on Geronimo, who went from being a feared indian warrior to a western legend and a circus sideshow atraction.

This book was very informative, but it left me questioning what he chose to include and exclude. Of course, one could write endless books telling the history of indiginous suffering at the hands of Europeans- but why these 4? They all feel very different. The book reads much more like 4 short books than a whole. Nevertheless, this book achieves its purpose. Read this book expecting to be shocked and amazed at the level of cruelty humans are capable of, but don't expect to find any sort of answer as to where that leaves us today. As a person of European decent, I felt strangly guilty and responsible. I suppose that's just what the author intended.

Crocker is a journalist who has previously proven his ability to write thoughtful, well-researched books that sell disappointing numbers. It is hard to blame the man for wanting to sell enough books to make some money. It is somewhat harder to take the amount of gore in Rivers of Blood, but one has to concede that he has the formula down. To sell books one must write about a) bad guys, b) harrowing, boodthirsty murder, c) really simple ideas. Here we have world class bad guys in the Europeans who set out to conquer the world by murdering all the people who lived everywhere else. The fact that these people fought back and sometimes won adds drama. But, hello? What about the role or European diseases, or the role of a European economic system that surely did as much as European weapons to destroy the non-European civilizations. Bloodthirsty conquest is as old as history. If the only thing that happened in the sixteenth century was that a bunch of European guys got on boats and set out to conquer other people, there would be no news to report. Mark Crocker misses most of the really important aspects of the Eurppean conquest of the world. I prefer my history more complex and closer to reality. Try reading Bullough's Pond if you really want to know what the American Indians were up against.

The premise of the book has become so cliched that its fundamental truth has almost become obscured. Cocker uncovers in painstaking detail the results of European colonialism in four areas of the world. Without ever romanticizing the societies (the bloody nature of the Aztecs is particularly stressed) that are conquered, he paints a tragic picture that moved me to the point of tears more than once. A valuable antidote to apologists for European/Western Imperialism.

I'm an avid birder, but this book was very disappointing. Filled with, at most, mildly amusing anecdotes about obsessive people "twitching" (as the Brits call it) to add to their country lists, I had trouble finishing it. This is birding at its most fatuous. The author concedes that chasing rare birds has no intrinsic value, bringing into question whether reading about the chasers has any value, either.

Kenn Kaufman's "Kingbird Highway" and George Levine's "Lifebirds" are much better books that capture the joy of birding and transcend the pointlessness of mere listing.

I love bird-watching and have spent many happy hours around the world behind a pair of binoculars but this book captures very little of the joy I get from watching birds. Yes it's occasionally funny and occasionally well written but most of the time it consists of little more than the birder equivalent of name dropping. I came away with a strong feeling that birding is a clique of people who feel that they are the only people who know what real birding is.

English author Cocker (Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, 2000, etc.) offers a combined celebration of and apologia for the national passion for birding, which in Britain provides both the thrill of high competition and the bonding of a cult. After 30 years of dealing with his own obsession for bird-watching (as it is somewhat more commonly known on this Atlantic shore), the author brings both experience and perspective to bear on the subject. However, novice birders should not expect a systematic treatise on advancing their craft. Cocker is much more interested in why than how, and he often lets his preoccupation with good form emerge in negative examples. Those who cannot deal properly with a bird's external anatomy, such as distinguishing between primary, secondary, and tertiary wing feathers, he asserts, may or may not be "bird lovers," but they're not birders. Expounding on perhaps the major difference between the way Brits and Americans typically pursue this fast-growing activity, he spends an entire chapter on the virtues of taking notebooks into the field and filling them up as fast and furiously as possible with sketches as well as text. The author is simultaneously at his best and most ambivalent in parables of fellow "twitchers," the (mostly) young bloods who have often dropped everything, including careers and spouses, to dash off somewhere far away for a glimpse of a rumored rarity. One friend and his wife, for example, cut short a US vacation and scramble back to England at word that a single Common Nighthawk has been spotted there (a rare occurrence) just a day after seeing nearly 50 of the same birds pass directly overhead in Cape May, New Jersey. Quirky and impulsive often beyond belief, some twitchers have been ultimately driven, the author effectively argues, to become among the finest interpreters on Earth of what nature can mean to human beings. Persuasive, idiosyncratic, and often quite amusing.