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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
