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Forming what amounts to a trilogy with Albert Marrin’s The Sea King: Sir Francis Drake and His Times (1995) and Ralph C. Staiger’s Thomas Harriot, Science Pioneer (not reviewed), this absorbing story of an adventurer’s adventurer takes readers from the brilliant, intrigue-ridden court of Queen Elizabeth to the unmapped reaches of North and South America, from dizzying heights of wealth and success to years of imprisonment and a traitor’s death. Aronson (Art Attack: A Short Cultural History of the Avant-Garde, 1998) portrays Ralegh as an upstart who rose high thanks to prodigious intellect, ability, and ambition, plus a “taste for total risks that brought the chance of greater glory,” but who was plagued, and ultimately killed, by his own misjudgments. With side excursions to Queen Elizabeth’s reign and “court of love,” the war with Spain, the predatory attitude with which European powers regarded the Americas, and the seductive legend of a vast hidden hoard of Inca treasure guarded by a golden man, “El Dorado,” Aronson not only details Ralegh’s career as soldier, sailor, explorer, writer, and schemer but consistently discusses causes, effects, and the broader significance of events large and small. Readers will be as riveted by his strong, dramatic writing as they are enlightened by his wide-ranging analyses. Illustrated with contemporary maps and prints, backed by capacious endnotes, this is as much a study of a culture at the threshold of the modern era as it is a tribute to one of the grand and grandly flawed figures who led the charge across that threshold. (index, timeline, cast of characters, author’s note, map, glossary, endnotes, bibliography) (Biography. 12+)
