It’s challenging to review this because since it was published in 1998, the pendulum of scholarly opinion has swung back towards emphasizing the atrocities, while Cook downplays them to focus on the impact of disease. It’s not that disease didn’t have a major impact–of course it did–just that in terms of historiography, the consensus now is to focus on the conscious choices of Europeans to be, frankly, major bastards.

That being said, Cook did his research so we don’t have to and the progression of dates and death tolls is, as it should be, horrifying.