Discover the Best Books Written by Charles C. Mann
Charles C. Mann (born 1955) is an American journalist and author specializing in scientific topics. In 2006 his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year. He is the co-author of four books and contributing editor for Science, The Atlantic Monthly, and Wired.
Mann was born in 1955 and graduated from Amherst College in 1976. Mann has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. In 2005 he wrote 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, followed in 2011 by 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. He served as a judge for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2012. He has also written for the TV series Law & Order.
He is a three-time National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife and children.
In 2018, Mann published The Wizard and the Prophet, which details two competing theories about the future of agriculture, population, and the environment. The titular "wizard" Mann refers to is Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize winner credited with developing the Green Revolution and saving one billion people from starvation. Mann refers to William Vogt, an early proponent of population control, as the "prophet."