PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewSince history is by nature episodic, the challenge of a book like The Years of Rice and Salt is to orchestrate a steady stream of new characters from different eras while keeping a core of familiar players on stage throughout. Robinson\'s solution is to borrow an article of faith common to the surviving cultures: reincarnation. By focusing on a small band of souls who are born and die and suffer rebirth again and again, he turns a speculative chronicle into a group biography that plays to the heart as well as the mind.
