Andrew, I enjoyed the review, but your first line -- "Ever since the first Europeans came to North America, only to discover the puzzling fact that other people were already living here" -- deserves a comment. Consciously or not, you are invoking a conception of American history that derives from 19th-century racialist ideology.

The historical fact is that "the first Europeans came to North America" (a continent that includes Mexico and the Caribbean) in search of "people already living here." Later ideology pictured America as a nearly uninhabited wilderness, on the one hand, and European settlers in northern North America on the other hand as coming here in search of land -- the "yeoman farmer" myth. But Europeans had plenty of land back home; what they lacked was wealth (especially in comparison with China and India) and labor to produce that wealth. (Think about it: otherwise, why would the Portuguese have had any success with the slave trade, which they began in the 1400s, well before the colonization of the Americas began? Why would a hypothetically overpopulated continent pay good money to import workers?)

From the very beginning, European exploration, conquest, and colonization of the Americas (including North America) fed, literally and figuratively, off of Native American wealth. If there had been no people in the Americas, there would have been no stores of gold and silver for Europeans to steal; that stolen gold directly financed further colonization, from Columbus to Raleigh and probably beyond. There would have been no crops specifically domesticated to fit the American climates. There would have been no stores of food to feed the starving sailors when they landed. There would have been no land already cleared for the first European farmers. Colonization of the Americas would eventually have gone forward -- nature abhors a vacuum -- but it would have taken place much, much more slowly than it historically did.

[BTW, this basic fact is generally overlooked by those who want to extrapolate from the voyages of Columbus and Magellan to the Apollo program and the exploration of space. Why haven't we gone back to the moon after 40 years? Because, dammit, there aren't any people up there! Nobody to trade with, nobody to work with, nobody frankly to exploit.]

And European colonization would have taken a different course: plot out the timeline of European settlement across the geography of the Americas, and you quickly see that the most populated (not the least) were the first to be colonized, the less populous next, and the uninhabited or nearly uninhabited regions were scarcely touched until three or four centuries after that first trip in 1492. No, the existence of people in the Americas (including North America) was not a "puzzling fact" -- it was the reasons Europeans bothered to come at all.

The colonization of Australia is absolutely a case in point of what I was describing. A route to the continent of Australia was discovered by the Dutch in 1606, but European colonization began with the establishment of a British penal colony in 1787, nearly two centuries later. Today, 220 years after that colony was founded, Australia (with virtually the same land area as the US) has a population of less than 22 million -- about the same as southern California.

Compare the Americas: route from Europe discovered in 1492; first European colony firmly established by 1496, just four years later. The first European city in the Americas, Santo Domingo, had a cathedral by 1514 and a university by 1538. Within another generation, the Spanish had found every large population in the Americas and planted parasite colonies (if I can use the phrase) on them; almost every major Spanish American city that exists today was founded by 1560.

The Dutch, French, and English came along later and got the colonial leftovers. Even so, in each case their first move was to copy the Spanish precedent by establishing colonies where there already were plenty of people, relative to what was left after the Spanish (and to a lesser extent the Portuguese) took all the good parts. If it took a couple hundred years for the descendants of British colonizers to move into the Cahokia region, it was because the local indigenous population there had collapsed after the 1200s. Had there still been a large city in Cahokia in the 1500s, you can bet the Spanish would have found it and established a colony there.

(BTW, none of this is meant as a criticism of Andrew O'Hehir's review -- it's just a tangential thread about an old hobby horse of mine!)