Category Archives: History

Edward Wilson-Lee – The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library

Christopher Columbus was not the only interesting person in his family. His son Hernando was also both accomplished and flawed. He also assembled what was probably the world’s largest library at the time. This book gets its title from 1,200 volumes of that library that were lost at sea. Hernando knew his father’s place in history, and as a youth even accompanied him on his fourth voyage. Hernando would also take his own voyage to Hispaniola later in life.

Hernando saw himself as a caretaker of the family legacy. He played a role in downplaying Christopher Columbus’ mysticism and other bizarre beliefs, as well as the degree to which Columbus misunderstood his discoveries. Hernando also played a large role in publishing and editing Columbus’ autobiography, which would shape popular history for centuries. Bartoleme de las Casas, one of my historical heroes and author of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, also plays a role in this story. He and Hernando did not get along.

Edwards-Lee intermingles this history, and Hernando’s role in it, with Hernando’s private life as a book collector, librarian, and scholar. This allows Edwards-Lee to delve into the history of printing, how different ways to organize libraries can help or hinder different kinds of research, and even compares different cataloging systems to early search engines (Hernando lived before Google).

This book is a hybrid of Hernando Columbus’ biography, the history of early transatlantic exploration, and a book about books. It’s a little disjointed both in scale and in subject matter, but is still an enjoyable slice of history.

Sean Howe – Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

I’ve been interested in corporate histories recently, from Ron Chernow’s books on Rockefeller and Morgan to modern biographies of Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. This is another one from that pile, though it also served the ulterior motive of familiarizing me with the Marvel Universe’s universe of characters in advance of seeing Avengers: Endgame. My Marvel fandom is decidedly casual, and I am unfamiliar with many of the characters’ origins and backstories. Adding to the confusion is that they are all interconnected in a larger universe.

This book also gives some background on just how much those characters and their universe reflect their time and place, from 1940s pulps to the national fascination with anything atomic in the 1950s and 1960s. The characters change and grow as the times do, and so does Marvel itself, which has frequently had to fend off bankruptcy as it periodically falls behind the times.

The company has been bought and sold several times over the years, and personalities clashes abound as art and commerce collide. Stan Lee turns his attention to Hollywood and being an ambassador of comics. Co-creator Jack Kirby gets nowhere near the credit he deserves, is stiffed financially, and leaves Marvel for its rival, DC Comics. Other writers also get screwed over, leading to a growing movement of independent companies.

As comics buyers grew up and had kids of their own, Marvel also had to add new titles, drop old ones, reboot stale characters that still had compelling attributes, and change its approach to hold onto its customers, and attract new ones. Progress is this department has been uneven at best; the comics world still isn’t exactly friendly territory for women or minorities, and some of the more hardcore fans are a little stunted—though they would likely still be that way had comic books never been invented. The companies slowly began to realize the goldmines they were ignoring, but many of their attempts are cringe-worthy. Things are better than they used to be, but this stunted male juvenile aspect of the business remains a work in progress.

This book is part business history, part explainer of the Marvel Universe, and part cultural history of 20^th century America. That’s an ambitious scope for any book, but Howe pulls it off. He might have done a bit more on the business side, but this reader has no serious complaints. As with the best Marvel stories, I was entertained and educated at the same time.

Dan Jones – The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors

An utterly conventional kings-and-battles account of the period. It’s a good survey of the period, but readers will have to go elsewhere if they want memorable portraits of the personalities involved, what everyday life was like in castle or court, or for the soldiers and their families, what the period’s economy and technology were like, what intellectual or religious life were like, or even the larger historical significance of the York-Lancaster rivalry.

Stephen Greenblatt – The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

This book-about-a-book is a colorful history of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things with the larger purpose of shedding light on the origins of modernity. Lucretius argued for a materialist view of science and philosophy that has far more in common with modern thought than with early Christian doctrine.

Perhaps not coincidentally, On the Nature of Things was nearly lost for nearly a millennium. During this long post-Roman dormant period, Lucretius was occasionally copied by monks and forgotten by the secular public. But a nascent humanist movement led to a growing number of book-hunters interested in finding and reviving old texts.

This movement eventually became the Renaissance, and Lucretius was unknowingly one of its leading intellectual inspirations. As far as afterlives go, Lucretius has had a good one.

Greenblatt writes well, and his accounts of the early humanist bookhunters and their interactions with disinterested monks in their monasteries are particularly vivid, though the contrast between the two camps was probably not quite as dramatic as he portrays it. He also has a good eye for the big picture, and traces the arc of Lucretius’ influence over an impossibly long timeframe. If you ever doubt the power of books, Greenblatt puts up a strong affirmative case.

The Swerve would pair well with Christpher Krebs’ similar but rather darker A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich.