I use Shepherd.com as a research tool, to
track down books on topics on which I am writing lectures or books. In the course of researching on Shepherd for a
project on Columbus, I came across Wilson-Lee’s book.
To my joyful surprise, it turned out to be not
only useful to my work, but an absolute pleasure to read. Wilson-Lee’s writing is erudite and
scholarly, and he shows a keen eye for fascinating digressions (the footnotes
are as compelling as the main text).
Yet
he also writes with wit and elegance, maintaining subtle narrative tension, and
effortlessly bringing the reader deep into the eccentric world of Hernando
Colón and his many books.
This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern.
At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world…
I
met Perri Klass several times back in the 1990s, and I was struck by how well
she managed to be a mother to young children, a full-time pediatrician, and an
author.
That connection inspired me to buy this book, but what started as a
merely curious read soon turned into a gripping one. This is a solid work of
historical scholarship, but Klass expertly turns the topic into a story that is
variously shocking, moving, alarming, and uplifting—while deftly inserting
occasional moments from her own experiences as a doctor.
I’m very far from being an expert on this
topic, so I learned an enormous amount. But it was the fine writing that made it hard to put the book down.
Only one hundred years ago, even in the world's wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers-of diarrhea, diphtheria and measles, of scarlet fever and meningitis. Culture was shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, poets and writers wrote about and lamented them. Not even the high and mighty could escape: presidents and titans of industry lost their children, the poor and powerless lost theirs even more frequently.
The near-conquest of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. Perri Klass pulls the story together for the first time, paying tribute to scientists, public health advocates,…
As you might guess from its sub-title, this is a
book that elicits strong responses: people seem to either find it wonderfully
eye-opening and important, or irritatingly driven by an agenda that is more
political-cultural than intellectual.
The fact that it provokes both
such reactions is, for me, crucial to why I found the book to be such a
compelling and enjoyable read. This is a
history that is full of surprises, one that has yet to be adequately
incorporated into our understanding of what happened in the Atlantic world in
the centuries after Europeans discovered Indigenous America (and the other way
round!).
Pennock might have chosen to
tell it completely dispassionately, but I really like that she chose not to do
that.
We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the 'Old World' encountered the 'New', when Christopher Columbus 'discovered' America in 1492. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others - enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders - the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs. The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a…
A dramatic rethinking of the encounter
between Montezuma and Hernando Cortes that completely overturns what we know
about the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
On November 8, 1519, the Spanish
conquistador Hernando Cortes first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the
entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction—the prelude to
the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland
of the Americas—has long been the symbol of Cortes's bold and brilliant
military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who
gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the
hemisphere.
