Maslin Watch: How Much in Today's Dollars, Though?

You know, maybe these field notes have been filtering their way back to the book desk, because today's review of The Island at the Center of the World, a history of Dutch Manhattan, is pretty good, if maybe a little hyperbolic. The only nit I'd pick is in this sequence:

Mr. Shorto assumes that certain things are established about early Dutch colonization of Manhattan and its environs: That Peter Minuit bought the island from Indians for the equivalent of $24. ("So he bought it. Everyone knows that.") That the Indians were ignorant savages, easily swindled. And that peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant was the best-known figure in New Amsterdam. Beyond that, how much has become common knowledge?

Somehow, I'm sure--or at least I would hope--Maslin didn't mean to suggest it was established as fact that "the Indians were ignorant savages," and wedged this assumption between an evidenced fact and an opinion that verges on fact quite unintentionally.