Easily satisfies Boyle’s premise that telling the customary three stories as one sheds valuable light on the Age of...
A new view of the connections and intrigues that bound together the New World’s principal discoverers.
London-based historian Boyle (The Troubadour’s Song: The Capture and Ransom of Richard the Lionheart, 2005, etc.) reconsiders the 15th century’s wave of transatlantic discoveries in terms of three prominent figures who not only knew each other but both collaborated and occasionally betrayed each other’s trust. It’s a grand span of history, still subject to revision as new information comes to light. In 1453, the Turkish conquest of Byzantium (Constantinople) threatened the Italian city-states’ opulence, heavily dependent on eastern trade routes to Asia. Christopher Columbus was then two years old, soon to be scampering the same Genoa back alleys as his boyhood pal (Boyle speculates) John Cabot, two years older. The author follows these two and their Florentine contemporary, Amerigo Vespucci, stressing that their primary motives were neither heroic nor humanitarian. The soon-to-be-named American continent had already been visited, either purposefully or by accident, he notes, by various other Europeans: Vikings briefly settled it 500 years earlier; English, Breton and even Basque cod fishermen had been driven ashore in gales, etc. The difference? These three were “ambitious but rather unsuccessful merchants…armed with a method—at least Columbus and Cabot—to profit by their discoveries that their rivals lacked.” These stateless mercenaries offered the New World’s largesse to monarchs of Spain and Portugal in return for a percentage for themselves. It didn’t pan out. Columbus’s fall was the hardest; in lieu of the gold he never found, he ultimately sent Taino Indians to Spain as slaves. The Tainos were probably already being enslaved, even cannibalized, by rival Caribs, Boyle comments, but Columbus was supposedly performing Christian acts. The author also suggests that Cabot’s death at sea, accepted as fact for centuries, may not have happened; here he elaborates on an alternative survival theory.
Easily satisfies Boyle’s premise that telling the customary three stories as one sheds valuable light on the Age of Exploration and its portent.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1651-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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