An enthralling, if ultimately unconvincing, hypothesis for the origins and motivations of Columbus.
Rosa offers an alternative portrait of Christopher Columbus in this debut work of historical revisionism.
It is now widely understood that certain elements of the popular story of Columbus (that he was the first European to reach America, that he alone in his era believed that the world was round) are false. Rosa presses even further, presenting the case that nearly everything that readers think they know about Columbus’ voyage to the New World—even the identity of the explorer himself —is fiction. Available in English for the first time, Rosa’s account of the true history of Columbus posits that the Admiral of the Ocean Sea was not the lowly son of a Genoese weaver but a member of one of Portugal’s most prominent families and the secret prince of Poland. A friend and agent of the Portuguese King João II, the Madeira-born Segismundo Henriques entered the service of Spain specifically to lure the Spanish west toward what he knew to be a new continent. In so doing, he hoped to distract them from the real India and thereby ensure Portugal’s trade hegemony. Furthermore, to obscure his true identity as the son of the dethroned king of Poland, Henriques adopted the pseudonym “Cristóbal Colón.” The secret has remained hidden for centuries, though clues in manuscripts, murals, ruined chapels, and DNA tell the real story for those clever enough to suss it out. Rosa is understandably defensive about having his work dismissed as a conspiracy theory, though what he advances is quite literally that: he argues that Columbus and others plotted to hide his true identity, to disseminate misinformation, and to deceive Spain for the benefit of Portugal. The author’s depiction of Columbus assuredly violates Occam’s razor, which doesn’t signify it can’t be true but does mean it isn’t terribly persuasive. “There is only one history of the world,” writes Rosa, “although there are countless ways for people to retell it.” With this nod to subjectivity, the author invites the reader to enjoy what is, in the end, a fun mystery surrounding one of history’s most prominent figures.
An enthralling, if ultimately unconvincing, hypothesis for the origins and motivations of Columbus.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-578-17931-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Outwater Media Group
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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