COLUMBUS

Vital and knowledgeable biography of the noted son of a Genoese weaver, distilled from a four-volume work (Cristoforo Colombo) by Taviani, president of the Italian Senate. In contrast to Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Columbus (p. 980), a real sense of the explorer's life as a fated adventure permeates this biography, beginning with Columbus's childhood in Genoa, the era's center of cartography and cosmography. As a teenager, Columbus smells the Orient for the first time on the Mediterranean island of Chios; shipwrecked after a bloody sea-battle in 1476, he takes the event in stride: ``The Lord our God miraculously sent me here so I could serve your highness....'' Taviani's asides are flavorful: Norsemen, he says, did not colonize North America because ``they did not find...potentates or lords whom they could massacre and whose goods they could seize''; Columbus falls in love in church because ``only in the half-light of a church could one stare at a nice girl without causing a scandal.'' (The girl is a full-blooded noble, well connected if impoverished.) The explorer's professional career and nautical genius are well detailed—endless voyages, endless accumulation of data and ideas, endless pursuit of honors. In the British isles, Columbus learns of the Norse discoveries; on the Atlantic, he learns about the trade winds, his knowledge of which established classic trade routes. When it's time to hustle, Columbus is canny and effective: Duke Don Luis de la Cerda Medicanelli sympathizes with ``Columbus's prudence and good sense...considering irrelevant any expenses deemed necessary, the more so as Columbus asked very little for himself.'' It's such a good deal that Ferdinand and Isabella take over, and Columbus plunges into the adventure that adds a hemisphere to the known world and introduces yaws—a ferocious new venereal disease—to Europe. A solid, well-written (and well-translated) account in which the man steps free of the research, complete with aspirations and appetites. (Ten full-color maps—not seen.)